MAYBE THOMAS WOLFE WAS RIGHT…MAYBE YOU CAN’T – Part Four

 

Continued from Part Three…
https://southernyankeewriter.blogspot.com/2022/01/maybe-thomas-wolfe-was-rightmaybe-you_15.html

“He had learned that he could not devour the earth, that he must know and accept his limitations.”

—Thomas Wolfe – You Can’t Go Home Again—

For a couple of weeks, Virginia and I just relaxed at Whitie and Reba Mae’s condo and did some touristy things with my parents or alone in our new car. We had been through a lot over the past year or so and this was a sort of R&R for us. It was also a chance to reconnect with my mother and father after years of contact that was always fleeting and always thinking that I’d be leaving soon to return to Argentina. This felt, to both them and me, as if, the Prodigal Son, I was finally “back home” after nearly twenty years.

Still, I wouldn’t feel I was really home until I reached Ohio. I wasn’t one of those snow-bird Ohioans always dreaming of living in warmer climes. To me, Florida always felt almost like a foreign country, some tropical republic unto itself. In fact, years later, when I started visiting Miami regularly on business, I would come to realize that that city was indeed a foreign country, or rather, a rich composite of foreign cultures, where I mostly spoke Spanish from the time I arrived until I left.

Reba Mae and Whitie were enjoying this time too. Whitie seemed at his best in Florida. Granted, north-central Florida, since, as a very white, very blond, very meticulous person, he found the beach, with its heat, sun and gritty sand, disagreeable. This part of Florida was, to him, sort of like Ohio with a much-improved climate, and, it was right on I-75. No directions needed, no way to get lost. You drove onto the South 75 ramp at the Wapakoneta city limits and drove south on the same road until you got to the sign that said OCALA SILVER SPRINGS NEXT EXIT, some thirteen and a half hours later.

During his fifteen years as a trucker/route salesman, he had come to detest winter, which had always been a hard time of year for him anyway, because his bipolarity seemed to be even more pronounced and his periods of depression deeper at the time of year when daylight waned. If he hated being out roasting in the sun, he feared and hated the short days and unending nights of winter in the northern climes even more.

Now he was playing host, introducing us to “his” Florida. He and Reba Mae took us to some of their favorite Ocala haunts, including a diner called Wulffy’s, where they loved to have breakfast, and a restaurant called The Oaks, where, Whitie assured us, “If you get there for supper before four-thirty, the salad bar’s only five bucks.”

They also took us on rides through the lovely countryside surrounding Ocala, best known for its wood-fenced horse farms, and gently rolling land. Reba Mae had been around horses as a little girl growing up on German-community tenant farms in west-central Ohio, and she would bring a few sugar cubes, or a couple of carrots, or a sliced apple in her purse and have Whitie stop along the road so she could coax a horse or two over to the fence by the road and pet their muzzles. I followed suit, remembering when I was a little boy, how she had taught me to keep the palm of my hand flat when offering a horse a slice of apple, a lump of sugar or a piece of carrot so it couldn’t grab my fingers, and how to pet its forehead and muzzle gently so as not to spook it.

Whitie, like a town kid at the county fair, touching
a horse for the first time.

Coaxed by my mother and Virginia, Whitie too would join us at the fence and tentatively run his hand over the animals’ muzzles, like a town kid at the county fair, touching a horse for the first time. Even though they clashed stridently from time to time, Virginia and Whitie had a connection. She and my mother never seemed to find a common ground on which they were comfortable together, but she “got” Whitie. She got what we all refused to see, because he was husband and father to us, which made us ask ourselves all the time, “What the hell’s wrong with this guy, and how can we fix him?” She got that, at some level, he was almost autistic—self-obsessed, inward-focused, obsessive-compulsive in the extreme, locked into minutely repetitive behaviors, haunted by largely unwarranted fears for the future, highly structured, yet manic-depressive and wildly bi-polar. She got that he was psychologically broken and needed understanding, not criticism.

Virginia enjoying a coffee in the "Florida Room"
of Reba Mae and Whitie's condo

She also understood that, through his own experiences, he got her. She always said that when we had gone back to Ohio in the early seventies, after I was discharged from the Army, and she had fallen into a period of deep depression from which she couldn’t seem to extricate herself until I took her home to Buenos Aires and her mother, “Your dad was the only one who understood what was happening to me, the only one who talked to me and tried to help,” instead of treating her like it was just a stage she was going through or a bit of home-sickness, and with time she’d be fine. He understood that she wouldn’t be fine. That she was lost and couldn’t find the path back until her situation fundamentally changed.

If we could have kept this in context or paid attention to what was going on, it would have made perfect sense to us. It had invariably been the case that whenever Whitie was hospitalized for his mental illness, he suddenly gained confidence and became a kind of guiding light in the psych ward—as long as he wasn’t forced to leave and go back home. Home, work, responsibilities, those seemed to be his depression triggers. He appeared to thrive in that controlled hospital environment, because he was with people who comprehended what he was going through, and psychologists always marveled at how he would gravitate to the other patients who were most lost, especially the younger ones, and try to help them see their problems more clearly. One psychiatrist at a place near Dayton where Whitie was in the hospital for an extended period, talked about how he had adapted to group therapy and had been a constant help to other patients. The doctor said that it was so remarkable that he actually thought Whitie had missed his calling and should have been a mental health care worker.

Silver Springs - "They ain't boilin'."

Whitie and Reba Mae also took us to the sites of their own adventures. We visited Silver Springs State Park, where, among other things, we took a ride in a glass-bottomed boat. The guide was a surly woman in her late-fifties or so, who dragged us reluctantly from our ignorance by explaining certain scientific facts to us.

“That there hangin’ from the trees,” she said with a wave of her hand, “is what they call Spanish moss. Only thing is, it ain’t moss and it ain’t Spanish.” Then later, as we gazed through the bottom of the boat at that crystal clear salt-spring water, “See them bubbles a-comin’ up down on the bottom? Around here, them’s called ‘boils’. But they ain’t boilin’. Fact is, that spring water’s downright cool. They just underground springs a-bubblin’ up.”

Another day, Whitie and Reba Mae drove us to St. Augustine, the oldest continuously inhabited city in the United States, and the capital of Spain’s American possessions for more than two centuries. We were just four more tourists enjoying a bright blue day and a sea breeze on the ramparts of Fort San Marcos.

Ocala National Forest

Later on, they introduced us to the Ocala National Forest, where we walked a couple of easy interpretive trails set up by the Parks Service for tenderfeet and the older folks to do in their JoyWalkers. From some of the helpful information posted along the way, I learned, for instance that sand pines were a species uniquely adapted to frequent wildfires, since their serotinous cones only open to release their seeds when heated. Virginia and I would go back later in our new—to us—van, to explore the backroads and to trek the hiking trails that wended their way through those strange woodlands, with their oddly disconcerting mix of tropical species, sand pines and scrub forest. It was an area known to harbor both typical gators and manatees and bizarrely out of place black bears, as well as deer, panthers, bobcats and red wolves.

St. Augustine

Later, also on our own in our van, Virginia and I enjoyed a daytrip that took us on picturesque Florida State Route 24, along the lower Suwannee River and the bayous of its estuary to Cedar Key. Had I known then what I know now, all of that would have been just as beautiful, but I wouldn’t have been able to separate it in my mind from the ugliness of the post-Civil War Reconstruction period in which places along that scenic route like Rosewood, Sumner and Cedar Key were the sites of white supremacist atrocities in the African American community.

It was in these very bayous of the Suwannee Estuary that terrorized and persecuted black folks hid for days on end in 1923, when random armed bands of marauding whites attacked their prosperous community in Rosewood and chased them as far as Sumner and the key, grabbing a few along the way and torturing them to get information about a fugitive falsely accused of beating a white woman. By the end of the mayhem, some one hundred fifty innocent African American residents of Rosewood had been murdered and many of their homes and businesses were burned to the ground.

Cedar Key - Ignorance was bliss.

On this day, however, ignorance was bliss. We simply marveled at the beauty of nature and enjoyed a lazy day in the little town of Cedar Key.

After a couple of weeks of this life, which would have been easy to get used to, Virginia and I headed north to Ohio. My parents’ home—the place that had seen me grow from a pre-teen to a young man—would be our base while I was searching for work. I’d made some inquiries already in Florida, and things were not looking particularly good. My timing for our move had, typically, sucked. The US was in the midst of one of its several post-war recessions. Although this one was mild by comparison to some of the others and was nearing an end, employment recovery had remained definitively sluggish. While still in Florida, I approached several news organizations, including the Miami Herald, where I had some contacts.

Virginia and a friend sun themselves at Cedar Key

My contact at the Herald was the first to explain to me that it was a really bad time to be seeking work in a US newspaper. The recession and the incipient growth of electronic journalism were kicking the profession’s proverbial ass. Although a guy like me—an experienced newsman, fluently bilingual, who had intimate knowledge of South America—was just the sort of person they normally would be looking to hire, the newspaper had only recently laid off forty journalists. Maybe in a few months when things got better. Keep in touch.

I had also approached The Charleston Evening Post Publishing Company, which was the majority shareholder of my alma mater, the Buenos Aires Herald, to see if they, perhaps, had a position for me. Like the fellow at the Miami Herald my closest contact there said that it wasn’t a good time. Had I, however, thought about a career in electronic journalism? Specifically, what did I think about considering a job with an affiliate TV station, of which the Post was majority shareholder, in El Paso, Texas, where my fluent Spanish would be a real asset.

I said I couldn’t really afford to be choosey, but I was a newspaper and magazine journalist, a writer, an editor. What sort of job was I being offered in TV? They said it was right up my alley. They wanted me to consider taking over the news department there.

So Virginia and I flew to El Paso via Albuquerque. We checked into a motel room in the desert on the outskirts of town that had been reserved for us. A car was later sent for us, and that evening we had dinner at a well-known local steakhouse with the former owner and now Evening Post partner at the local TV station. The man was an urbane, white-haired Texan in a sky-blue, Western-cut suit, who was accompanied by a young woman who, because of the obvious bond between them, I might have guessed—were I being presumptuous—was perhaps his daughter or granddaughter by an Hispanic wife or daughter. It was a lucky thing that I reserved judgment, awaiting a formal introduction, because it turned out that she was the wife.

Over Texas beef and fine wine, the man told me that he was looking to make changes in how his news department was being run, and Charleston had told him I might well be the man for the job. He wanted more hands-on news management, somebody who lived the news and was constantly looking for leads and follow-ups. He wanted more dynamic newswriting and a lot more on-the-scene reporting. He wanted greater engagement with the Hispanic community, and he wanted the networks to come to El Paso for the TV news, not the other way around.

El Paso, Texas

It sounded challenging. Just the sort of thing I was looking for to jumpstart my career out of its mid-life crisis, even though neither Virginia nor I was very excited about the prospect of living in El Paso. After dinner, our host drove us back to our hotel. The TV executive was obviously prosperous, driving a late-model Lincoln Mark VII that pretty much matched the color of his suit, while his affable and welcoming wife wore a heavy gold chain around her neck bearing several large, coin-like pendants that found a convenient resting place in the broad cleavage of her ample bosom, as well as a veritable treasure trove on her fingers and earlobes.

He didn’t look like a man who would be averse to discussing money, so while his wife was seeking to entertain mine on the drive back to the hotel, I boldly asked what he figured this job might be paying if I decided to accept it. He said why didn’t I have a look around, meet the folks at the station, and all, the next day, and then we’d discuss details. He’d have “his man” pick me up the next morning and show me around.

“His man” introduced himself as the news director at the station. He arrived with his wife to pick us up late in the morning. They were both amiable, genuine, soft-spoken people and, as we talked, I realized that this guy was not only an experienced newsman, but a fellow with a sound career in, and understanding of local TV. We chatted about the idiosyncrasies of the community, and he took me downtown to the station for a look around. He had a keen insight into how being a border town affected the life, culture and society of places like El Paso. He, like myself, seemed like a shy guy who’d had to overcome his own retiring nature in order to become an effective newsman. I got him and he got me, and the four of us spent a not unpleasant day together touring El Paso and the surrounding area, despite the fact that my host seemed somewhat antsy and preoccupied throughout the day. At the end of the tour, that evening, he and his wife invited us for cocktails at a place that seemed to be frequented by movers, shakers and wannabes. After a couple of margaritas, the news director finally cut the crap and said, “So Dan, what exactly is the job that the boss is offering you?”

I said, “Well, I’m not exactly sure, but it sounds like he wants me to head the news team.”

He blanched, slowly nodded while looking frankly at me, and said, “So, essentially, my job.”

I was caught on my hind foot and faltered for a second before saying, “Uh, well, I hardly think so. I mean, you’re obviously an experienced TV guy with a lot of flying time under your belt. No, I think more like a news editor, news-writer, and assignment editor.”

With a wry grin, he said, “Right, so, my job.”

“Geez,” I said, “I don’t think so. I mean, if that were his plan, why the hell would he have you, of all people, showing me around?”

“You clearly don’t know the boss,” he said. “He can be one twisted sonuvabitch.”

Back in my town, Wapakoneta, Ohio

The next morning, when I put this theory to the station executive before we were due to catch our flight back east, he confirmed that replacing the current news director was the plan, but that he would want us to work together for a time, until I could get acclimatized, before he gave the other guy the boot. In the meantime, the current guy would be told that I was being brought in to assist him. Although I’d worked hard at becoming hardboiled and ruthless in two decades of journalism, my heart suddenly wasn’t in it. Especially since it spoke more clearly about the trustworthiness (or not) of the station executive than it did that of the fellow I was supposed to replace.

If this hadn’t been sufficient to end the negotiations, the annual salary he finally quoted to me was. It was less than half what I had been making as managing editor of the paper in Buenos Aires. Clearly, he was aware of the abysmal employment climate in journalism and figured good editors were a dime a dozen. That kind of disdain made him someone I really didn’t want to work for.

We shook hands and parted…forever.

Ohio greeted us with the kind of Artic winter
I'd known as a kid.

Now, back in Ohio—that welcomed me with the kind of Arctic winter I’d known as a kid—we made ourselves at home in my childhood residence, to which Whitie and Reba Mae wouldn’t return for another month or so, and I continued my job search. I talked to one of the news editors and to the Washington correspondent for USA Today, with whom I had worked in Buenos Aires, when the publisher was on a South American tour and took a news team with him to write color stories. I was their local guide and was also added to the reporting team. Later on, I would contribute reporting to the paper as a stringer, once they all left and went back to the States.

But here too, it was the same story. If I’d been in Buenos Aires, they might have been able to find some story assignments for me. But one thing nobody needed right now in the US was another out-of-work journalist. I tried ABC Radio News in New York, an organization I had, during several years, reported for in South America in the nineteen-seventies. But by this time both Charlie Arnot and Mark Richards, the two fabled veteran assignment editors I had worked for back then, had both retired, and the new guys, who didn’t know me from Adam, “weren’t looking for anybody right now, thanks.”

So, I eventually decided I would be biding my time for a while in Ohio, and, for the moment, I needed to relax and find something to do there. Meanwhile, I thought, maybe I could just enjoy not being an expatriate for a bit. That would prove a lot harder than I imagined.

To be continued…

MAYBE THOMAS WOLFE WAS RIGHT…MAYBE YOU CAN’T – Part Three

Continued from Part Two

https://southernyankeewriter.blogspot.com/2022/01/maybe-thomas-wolfe-was-rightmaybe-you.html

 

“This is a man, who, if he can remember ten golden moments of joy and happiness out of all his years, ten moments unmarked by care, unseamed by aches or itches, has power to lift himself with his expiring breath and say: "I have lived upon this earth and known glory!”

―Thomas Wolfe—

You Can’t Go Home Again 

The somewhat reluctant helping hand I got from my parents—reluctant on my father’s part, anyway—seemed to change my luck. A friend who was the CEO/publisher of an up-and-coming business magazine in Buenos Aires offered me a job reporting and translating for his organization. I had known this guy, Gabriel Griffa and his partner, Marcelo Longobardi—who was now on the verge of becoming a very well-known radio and television personality—since they had founded Apertura, their magazine, a decade earlier. Back then, they had both been college students, barely out of their teens, and had put their first few issues together on a table in a bar because they still didn’t have an office.

The result was lively, chock-full of interesting stories and excellent writing, and it was a publication that sought to take the best in avant garde style from premier US magazines like Rolling Stone, Esquire, The Atlantic, Forbes and Fortune, but in Spanish.  I was twelve years older than they were with nearly a decade of experience under my belt and had helped them with contacts and publishing tips when they were first starting out, as well as treating them to lunch whenever I could at a couple of good restaurants where I had credit from advertising swap-outs at the newspaper.

They hadn’t forgotten me now that they were becoming two successful young entrepreneurs. I should have jumped at the chance without hesitation, but, as I said earlier, I had just been gravely ill and was still recovering. Since every place I’d worked in the media, I had ended up in positions of responsibility and authority, I wanted to ensure for the moment that this job wouldn’t be putting that kind of pressure on me.

At first, I accepted a lower-level monthly salary simply to be the house translator. The magazine made use of a lot of licensed articles from major international magazines. My job was to translate these pieces from English to Spanish. I always dealt with correspondence between Apertura and the English-language publications they sought rights from. I worked closely with the general news editor and liked that. Alicia Cerri and I had known each other for some time. She was, like me, a veteran journalist with an old-school approach to the news. She understood what had just happened to me, even though I didn’t discuss it openly with her. She’d clearly been-there-done-that too, I figured, before she’d come to Apertura.

We were already doing in-depth research
on Trump back then at Apertura.

She made sure she assigned me the translations she was going to use in each issue with plenty of lead time, so I was able to organize the work at a leisurely pace. After the hectic activities of a daily newspaper, it was easy-peasy.

I liked the job. I was in the editorial department again, I was an older, respected newsman whose reputation most of the staff knew, and I got to talk daily with journalists as their colleague rather than as their boss. But in terms of what I did, it wasn’t any more stressful than a nine to five office job.

As she saw me getting stronger and showing more and more interest in the day-to-day of the magazine, Alicia started pitching stories to the publishers that she thought were right up my alley as an investigative reporter and commentator. I started with one that was sort of “science-fiction”, for an entire issue that the magazine was doing on The Future.

They asked me to write on the future of media. This was the latter part of the eighties. Internet Services Providers wouldn’t even emerge in the US until 1989. But as I say, Apertura was an avant garde magazine, so we were already doing a great deal of research on the incredible advancements in resource and information-sharing. After many hours of research, I came up with a sort of “artist’s conception” of what I figured the future media would look like. I accurately foresaw the future struggle to be faced by print media and the advent of worldwide electronic communications.

It was hilarious because I was a tech-dinosaur, a literary Neanderthal who was writing this piece on an old manual Olympia typewriter. But at one point, it was like a revelation, a prescient moment in which I wrote that, someday, not too far distant in the future, guys like me, who made their living doing research, commentary and translating, would be able to do it all online, with access to more and better information than they could ever possibly use. They would, I said, be able to work from anywhere, as long as they had a satellite signal. Even, I suggested, from a cabin in the mountains in the middle of basically nowhere.

In my home studio in the post-Herald days.

As I wrote it, I was just letting my mind and imagination fly. I figured this would all happen when I was long dead or too old to care. Nobody could have told me then that, half a decade later, in 1994, I would be doing just that from my mountain home in Patagonia.

Anyway, the publishers loved the story and started asking me to do more stuff. I said, look, it was one thing to write a lyrical essay like this one, but I was an English-language writer. Spanish-language journalism was a whole other ball of wax. I didn’t have the tools, the style, or the jargon for it.  “Anything I write,” I said, “is going to sound like an American magazine article in Spanish, not like an original Spanish-language piece written by an experienced Argentine writer.”

That, they said, was exactly what they wanted—an article in eloquent Spanish that sounds like a Yankee magazine. “And your writing in Spanish is better than that of half the local people we’ve got writing for us.”

Suddenly, I was feeling good about myself again. I wasn’t sure what had happened to me, how I’d fallen so low, but I was back! And I was being recognized for the professional that I had become. By a few months later, I had gone from being assigned brief single-source pieces with minimal reporting to doing secondary research articles with considerable “leg-work” and a number of interviews, and, finally, to being asked to do two major cover stories.       

But as I got deeper and deeper into the profession again, I couldn’t help remembering how I’d gotten here. And after the crisis I’d just been through, it was no longer just about “having a job.” I was, at heart, an American writer. My language was English, no matter how fluent I might be in Spanish. And I blamed the fact that I’d lived nearly twenty years on a market where what I wrote in was a second language for my lack of opportunities to reach success in my culture of origin. It might work okay for journalism because here, I, like other foreign correspondents, was a novelty. An English-speaker who was an expert on a Spanish-speaking region of the world. That meant that what I brought to the table wasn’t just my craft as a reporter and writer, but also a deep understanding of an entirely different culture and of how it operated within the context of the world order.

I tended to forget this last all-important aspect of my craft when I fixated on “going back home”. My idea was that, surely, one or the other of the publications I had worked for abroad would be interested in hiring me as a reporter when I returned to the States. Once I landed a steady job in a major city, I figured, I would continue developing my creative writing in my spare time and would finally be on a market where I could pitch my creative fiction and non-fiction to US agents and publishers.

I had it all figured out.

My confidence improved and my health restored, after about a year of working and saving, I decided that it was now or never, if I was ever going to “go home again”. A major stumbling block was the fact that, for Virginia, going to the US to live wasn’t a matter of “going home”. It was all about leaving home. Leaving behind her country, her city, her family, her life. Although she had enjoyed the fun of being an exchange student in high school and college, she had quickly learned, when I’d first been discharged from the Army and we returned to Ohio, that it was one thing to be a cultural exchange guest in that society, and quite another to be “just some foreigner” in a place, like many in America, that was not particularly friendly toward “aliens”.

Virginia was already home. Why would she
ever want to leave?

During the first six months that we struggled to make a living after I was discharged from the Army back in 1973, she had suffered on-the-job isolation, discrimination and racism. It was her first-ever experience with any of these things, and it broke her. She became clinically depressed and eventually became nauseous and dizzy every time she had to leave our rented apartment in Lima, where she also felt looked down on. She had loved living in Europe, during my final posting in the Army, but now, in the rural and industrial Midwest, she was impossibly homesick and inconsolably sad. Never had the word “alien” been more fitting. She may as well have been a Martian as an Argentine.  

That was why I had originally made a decision to go live in her country “for a year” and ended up staying for nearly twenty. But now, I was passing her the bill for that. I was basically saying that if I had forged a life as an expatriate in her country for all those years, perhaps it was time she should try living in mine for a while.

It wasn’t the same. Not at all. Even back then, in the nineties, the US had become a country that had forgotten that the vast majority of its citizens descended—as Jorge Luis Borges once quipped—“from boats” rather than from any native culture. And now the sons and daughters and grandchildren of the immigrants who had populated the United States shunned as “aliens” the new immigrants in their midst.

In Argentina, on the other hand, I had seldom been treated with hostility for being American, except by people on the extreme political fringes. On the contrary, being an American had, ninety percent of the time, played in my distinct favor. Given how the US had always treated Latin American citizens from the Mexican border to sub-Antarctic Ushuaia, I might well have expected, as a Yankee, to be drawn and quartered and fed to the rats as soon as I arrived. But I had nearly always been treated with friendly respect by the vast majority of people.

Still, that was my line of reasoning, and I was sticking to it. I came to your country with you, now you go to mine with me. But if it came down to that, I couldn’t be at all sure how she would react. Realistically, however, I figured the most likely scenario was her saying that she was where she wanted to be. She was home. That I’d had plenty of time to make it my home too. But if I wanted to be somewhere else, it was my decision. I should go if I must. But I would have to go alone.

I was no good at discussing such emotional issues. I did my best thinking on paper. If I had to debate a difficult case like this aloud, the flood of emotions it was sure to bring up would surely stand in the way of saying what I wanted to say and how I wanted to say it.

So I wrote Virginia a letter. I tried my best for it to be dispassionate, logical, clear-cut. The last thing I wanted it to sound like was an ultimatum. But no matter how I sought to cut it, an ultimatum was precisely what it sounded like. Like “either/or”—like “either-or else”. No matter how eloquently, no matter how lovingly I tried to put it, the ultimate message was the same: “I’ve come to a decision: I’m leaving. Come with me if you want to or stay here if you don’t, but I need this to survive.”

Reluctantly, she acquiesced.

We arrived in Miami in mid-January of 1991. My father and mother were wintering at their condo in Ocala. Whitie had made it clear that he wasn’t about to “try and drive in goddamn Miami,” so we rented a car to make the five-hour trip from Miami International to Ocala.

We parked in a guest space in front of their place in the condo complex. If was the first time we’d been there. Reba Mae was evidently watching from the window because as soon as we got out of the car and started getting our luggage out of the trunk, she appeared at the top of the steps to their second-floor apartment.

“Did you have any trouble finding us? Oh, it’s so great to see you both. Come in! Come in!”

When we got inside, Whitie was waiting in the entryway. Virginia gave him a hug and then she and my mother went off for a tour of the condo. I was still standing there with a suitcase on either side of me saying hello to Whitie. We shook hands, gave each other a stiff, perfunctory hug and then he laid his right hand on my left shoulder and looked as though he were about to say something important to me. Perhaps that he was glad to see me, that he’d missed me all those years, that he was happy I’d finally decided to move “back home”.

Instead, he leaned in close and lowered his voice so my mother and Virginia wouldn’t hear, and said, “Hey Dan, have you got that five grand I loaned you, because I need it.” Right there in the entryway, I dug out one of the envelopes of cash that I had distributed between Virginia and me and which represented the scant capital that we had been able to put together for a fresh start in the US by closing out our bank account and selling whatever we could before leaving Argentina. I removed its contents and counted out fifty crisp new hundred-dollar bills, placing them in my father’s outstretched hand.

“Thanks Dan,” Whitie said. And then, with, what seemed to me, hollow concern in his voice, he said, “You gonna be okay with what you’ve got left?”
I said, “Guess I’m going to have to be,” and then carried our suitcases away in search of the spare bedroom.

I had wanted to drop the rental car in Ocala, but Ocala didn’t have a rental agency branch. The closest one was Daytona Beach.

 We were all having a cup of coffee that Reba Mae had brewed and were sitting around talking. I said, “Listen, before we get too settled in, I have to turn in my car. Think you could drive over with me in your car and bring me back, Dad?”

“Sure.”

“Good. We better get started. The drop is in Daytona Beach.”

“Daytona! Geezus, Dan, why so far? That must be a good hour and a half from here!”

Whitie and me in Ocala

“Well, it was either that or have somebody pick us up in Miami. Ocala doesn’t have an agency.”

“Oh come on now, Dan,” Whitie said incredulously, “You mean to tell me that there’s no place to drop it off here?”

“That’s exactly what I mean to tell you. You think if there were, I’d want to drive all the way to Daytona when I just drove five hours up here from Miami?”

“Well, that’s sure a helluva note,” Whitie complained.

“Well, sorry,” I said, “but I can’t drive two cars over there, so if you’d like to lend me a hand…” I trailed off.

“Let’s all go!” Reba Mae said enthusiastically. “It’ll be a fun drive.”

In the first couple of weeks that we were in Ocala, however, Whitie showed his enthusiasm and caring in other ways. One of my first tasks was to find us a serviceable vehicle. When I asked Whitie if I could borrow his car a few hours, he said, “Where ya goin’?”

“To look for a car to buy,” I said.

“Well, pardon me for saying so, Dan, but you’ve never been much of a horse-trader. How ‘bout if I tag along.”

“Sure,” I said.

I really had no problem with that. My father knew cars. And he was the kind of negotiator who beat sellers down until they were practically ready to give the cars away just to be rid of Whitie. Furthermore, he knew exactly where to go. So we all got into his big Mercury Grand Marquis and made an outing of it.

We drove straight to an enormous used auto mart on Southwest 17^th Street in Ocala. On the way, Whitie asked me how much I wanted to spend and what I was looking for. I said I preferred a van to a sedan, but that I didn’t, obviously, have a lot to spend, so I wanted the best vehicle I could get for the least amount of money possible.

The salesman’s name was Del Río. He was a small, nervous man in his thirties. He was a fast talker and wore sunglasses—even indoors. I said I was looking for a van, but that I wasn’t going to use it to work, so economy was more important than a huge engine.

“Your best bet, then, is a mini-van,” he said. “Roomy, comfortable and great mileage. What model are you looking for?”

“Not sure,” I said, “But with the money I’ve got to spend…”

“We can set you up with financing,” Del Río said.

“No, cash,” I said shaking my head. “I figure maybe five or six years old, say.”

“Definitely a mini-van then,” he said.

“How mini’s mini?” I asked, by now more familiar with European cars than I was with late-model American ones. He signaled me to follow him. Whitie and I trooped over to have a look-see while Virginia and my mother waited inside.

We made our way down a long corridor of cars and trucks parked side by side according to type, make and model. The two he showed me were across from each other—Chevy on one side, Chrysler on the other. “This is an eighty-five Chevrolet Astro,” Del Río said, doing a Vanna White with his left hand toward the Chevy line, and then repeated the gesture with his right, saying, “And this is an eighty-six Dodge Caravan.”

Whitie and I looked at the interiors of the two vehicles, walked around them both, checking out the paint and body, kicking the tires and measuring the depth of their treads with our thumbnails while Del Río stood by, in desultory fashion, smoking a Marlboro. We opened the hoods, peered in at the engines and wiring. Whitie stuck a hand in and wiggled this and that. Then we dropped the hoods and turned to the salesman.

“What are you asking for ‘em?” said Whitie.

“Fifty-nine hundred for the Chevy and seven-nine for the Chrysler.”

“Geezus!” Whitie said. “That’s goddamn highway robbery!”

“Very serviceable vehicles,” Del Río said. “The former owners are both old customers of ours. These are both cream-puffs.”

“They better be cream-puffs with hot fudge, nuts and cherries for those prices,” Whitie said. Then, “So can we take ‘em for a spin?”

“Sure. Let me just go get the keys.”

When the salesman left, I said, “I really like that Chrysler. But I can’t afford that kind of money right now.”

“Oh hell, Dan,” Whitie said. “Don’t worry. You won’t pay anywhere near the asking price for either of them.”

“What makes you think so?”

“Trust me. It’s January! See how many goddamn cars they’ve got on this lot? They’ve gotta clear out their inventory before tax time. He’s on a fishing expedition with those prices.”

Del Río came back with the keys.

“We’ll be back shortly,” Whitie said.

“Great, I’ll wait for you inside.”

We took the Chevy out first. Whitie said it had some road noise up front, which might mean the front end was about shot. It also felt sort of doggy to drive. No pick-up, like maybe the engine wasn’t in the greatest of shape. Then we drove the Chrysler, and I fell in love with it.

“But it’s got a helluva lot of miles on it,” I said.

“Yeah,” said Whitie, “but did you see the engine? That’s no Chrysler motor. It’s a Mitsubishi. It’s only got a hundred thousand on it and those Jap motors’ll do two hundred without ever having to do any maintenance on ‘em, so I wouldn’t worry much about that if it runs okay.”

“Runs like a rabbit.”

“There ya go, then.”

  “Okay,” Whitie said as I drove up in front of the show room, “Let me do the talking, okay?”

“Fine with me.”

“Didn’t I tell you that was a great car?” Del Río beamed as we pulled up and he came out of the building.

I smiled.

Whitie said, “Not for that price, it’s not. That car has some issues. For one thing, geezus, it’s almost been all the way around the damn globe.”

“Oh, don’t worry about that, Mr. Newland,” Del Río said. It has a Mitsubishi four-cylinder, powerful little engine that gets good mileage and they’ll literally run forever.”

“Who the hell told you that fairytale?” Whitie said with a grin. “We fought the Japs during World War Two and now we’re buying engines from them for American cars? Not sure how I feel about that.”

“Great engines!”

“Yeah, say them.”

“Well,” said Del Río, “let’s go inside and see if we can’t make a deal.”

Inside, Virginia joined Whitie in the assault on our salesman. As he was telling us all of the wonderful features of the vehicle and trying to convince us that we would “never find a more impeccable previously owned automobile,” Virginia suddenly said, “Excuse me, but would you mind taking off your dark glasses?”

The guy looked at her like, “Come again?”

“I’d like to be able to see your eyes while you’re telling us all this.”

Del Río flushed to the roots of his short-cropped hair, but removed his glasses, and kept talking. The poor guy had a cast in one eye that made him look like he was looking at you with one eye, while mounting a lookout with the other to make sure nobody was sneaking up on him from the side. Before long, Virginia repented, said, “Sorry, you can put your glasses back on,” to which he said, “Thanks,” and did so.

“If you want us to buy it,” Whitie said, “You’re gonna have to come way the hell down on the price.”

The Caravan - thanks to Whitie, ours for a song

“Just a minute,” said the salesman, “let me go talk to the manager.”

After he’d left, my father said, “Yeah right. Talk to the manager. He’s gonna go talk to a Marlboro and be right back.”

About a cigarette’s-worth later, Del Río was back. “Well, I got you a great discount. We’re knocking off a thousand bucks. Six-nine instead of seven-nine.”

Whitie looked disgusted and said, “Come on, Dan. Let’s go down the road.” And we started toward the door.

“Wait, don’t go. We’re negotiating here. How much would it take for you to drive this car off the lot today?”

“I don’t know,” Whitie said. “Make me a serious offer and we’ll see.”

“Let me go talk to my manager.”

And on and on this song and dance went for perhaps an hour until it finally came down to “Name your price.”

In the end, we all shook hands, the administration made out the paperwork, I shelled out three thousand six hundred dollars cash, and drove the mini-van off the lot.

As we were getting into our cars, Whitie come over to me and murmured, “See there, your ol’ man got you most of that five grand back.”

To be continued…