Of Memories & Men November 2004 Click to view Table of Contents Click to view photo gallery Click to view cover story

Fiction

I Survived Caracas Traffic By Richard Grayson

Photograph by Charlie O'Shields

I am driving up ­ down? ­ in Miami, quien sabe? ­ Brickell Avenue in my brother's Corvette, my brother's son next to me in his baby-seat. The State of Florida requires that babies have their own seats in cars, to protect them. Although in 1986, the State of Florida does not yet require adults to wear seat belts, I am wearing mine, because I got used to doing so in New York and Massachusetts, where it is already required by law. In my back window, other drivers can see the yellow diamond-shaped sign BABY ON BOARD CARRIES NO CASH! This is Miami, after all, though I would suppose it would be best if babies carried no cash anywhere.

I am carrying little cash, but in my wallet I have a gold American Express card; a Diners Club card; a gold ("Preferred") MasterCard issued by Southeast Bank, whose new skyscraper headquarters glides by in my rear-view mirror; a gold ("Premier") Visa issued by Chevy Chase Savings and Loan in Maryland; a Choice card issued by Citibank (Maryland), N.A.; an never-used, almost-brand-new Discover card issued by the Greenwood Trust Company of Delaware. Get me next to the right automatic teller machine ­ for example, Presto! at Publix Supermarkets ­ and I can have cash coming out of my ears. This is living, as Lynn Redgrave says on the Weight Watchers commercials.

"Que pasa, kiddo?" I say to Rafael, who is only two and doesn't say much of anything, in either English or espanol. His parents ­ my brother Michael and sister-in-law Ines ­ are somewhere off (out?) in the greenish waters on our left, making a drug run on a yacht. They take a circuitous route. My brother is involved with his brother-in-law and some other guys, whose wives and girlfriends also come along to make it look like a pleasure cruise.

"Cruise," I say to Rafael. "Say 'cruise.' Say 'cruz.' Say 'cruziero.' Say 'Citibank.'" At home I have three credit cards issued by Citibank (South Dakota), N.A.

Rafael looks at me like I'm nuts. "See those big buildings, Rafael? They were built with money that came from cocaine." My nephew is indifferent to the sleek mirrory structures on Brickell Avenue. They house banks ­ laundromats for money ­ which also issue Visas and Mastercards like the ones I have in my wallet. Mostly, these are cash-rich Florida banks, but some Edge Act banks too. It came as a surprise to me that Edge Act banks were named after a Senator Edge, since I had always assumed they were banks from other states that were allowed to exist on the edges of the country, like Miami.

Coming up on our left are those playful apartment buildings designed by the firm Arquitectonica, that are seen in the opening credits of Miami Vice: The one with electric blue trim with the palm tree stuck in a hole in its middle. The one with a gaudy red triangle on top. The one with dozens of pastel colors, painted by an Israeli artists, a building I always associate with Joseph's coat of many colors.

My brother Michael, two years younger than I, is somewhere in the western Caribbean now, though of course I have no idea where. I worry about him. His wife, Ines, is from Venezuela, although her family is Jewish, like ours, and has a German last name. I imagine Michael and Ines sunning themselves on the deck of their yacht, looking to all the world ­ and the Coast Guard, and the DEA, and the Vice President's task force ­ like honeymooners. They act that way when they're not fighting.

"Having fun?" I ask Rafael. We are passing Vizcaya now.

"Okay," he says. He has green eyes and blond hair, like my brother and me. He is wearing a yellow T-shirt that says I SURVIVED CARACAS TRAFFIC. His grandparents got it for him to grow into on one of their trips home, in better times ­ when oil was going for twenty-nine dollars a barrel. Now I hear that things are very bad in Caracas; everyone has taken to the streets to peddle, to fix shoes, to beg.

Once, I had a T-shirt that said I SURVIVED THE GREAT NEW YORK BLACKOUT OF 1977. Somehow, I've survived the decade since then, too.

"What do you think, Rafael?" I ask. "When the next Holocaust survivors' convention comes to Miami Beach, do you think your old uncle here should make up T-shirts that say I SURVIVED THE NAZI HOLOCAUST? Huh?'

"No!" he says emphatically, in either English or Spanish ­ or Haitian Creole, for that matter.

When I was a kid back in Brooklyn, way back around 1965, when there weren't many Haitians, a Haitian woman once came up to me and said, "Excuse me, but could you tell me which streets colored people are allowed to walk on?"

I was dumbfounded. Here it was 1965, I'd just been bar-mitzvahed, the Civil Rights Act had been pushed through Congress, we were on the corner of Nostrand and Flatbush, and this woman was asking me what streets she could walk on.

"Huh?" I said. "Are you kidding me?"

She explained that she was new to the U.S., from Haiti, and had surmised from conversation that black people would be in danger if they walked down certain "whites only" streets.

"This is America," I proclaimed. "Lady, you can walk anywhere you want and nobody can do a thing about it."

When I was a couple of years older, I realized that maybe I didn't give this woman such hot advice. After all, I didn't exactly feel safe walking down streets in greaser/hitter territory myself.

Still, I survived, and probably so did the Haitian woman. What was it Faulkner said about Dilsey and the blacks in Sound and the Fury? ­ "They endured." And then in Sweden, getting the Nobel prize, the old drunk says mankind won't just endure, it will prevail. I may be getting the verbs wrong, but basically that's what old Bill was saying.

Right. I always found Faulkner had to read. Except for The Sound and the Fury, I never really got through any of his other novels, except skimming through Absalom, Absalom. I liked that Quentin Compson, though. What did his father tell him? "Time is the reductio ad absurdum of human existence…Victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools."

When I was eighteen, that was the kind of stuff I liked to hear.

I've got the collapsible Aprica stroller out ­ is it a myth that the guy who invented it is now a billionaire? ­ and Rafael and I are strolling down Main Highway in Coconut Grove. The day is bright, hot, but there's the saving grace of a breeze. One of spring's last cold fronts has made it this far down the peninsula. A cute guy on a skateboard wheels past us. Sun-bleached blond hair, great tan body, and that sense of studied casualness common to 17-year-olds these days. "Hey, Rafael," I say, "do you want a skateboard when you grow up?"

"Okay." He is more interested in the Mrs. Fields cookie he is trying to get into his mouth ­ and on his cheeks and chin, and CARACAS T-shirt.

Coming towards us are two Cuban girls in tube tops and running shorts, each with headphones on, sharing some Walkman music. Suddenly, I feel tired.

I stroll Rafael back to CocoPlum, get a seat by the window, and order iced tea and key lime pie, though I know the pie will do me no good, and is probably made with Persian rather than key limes.

They don't have a baby seat for Rafael, so I keep him next to me in the stroller. He's such a quiet, well-behaved kid. Don't his parents encourage him to talk?

"Don't blame me, I'm a shy Libra," Sean used to say when I got after him about being more sociable. When he went off to Gainesville to go to UF, he didn't have many friends. Mostly he stayed home, in the trailer his mother had rented for him. He had a roommate, a hairdresser who did most of the cooking. And of course, what I didn't know was that this guy, whom he knew from Fort Lauderdale, was driving up every other weekend, and that Sean was driving down every other weekend. After that October, when he called me at 2 a.m. from a Majik Market to say how unhappy he was, he didn't call again till early Christmas Eve, when he showed up at my condo just as I was about to go work out at the health club.

I'd been a Nautilus junkie that year ­ I started right after Sean left for Gainesville ­ and as much as I wanted to see him, I felt antsy about missing my workout because the club would close early that evening and wouldn't be open the next day.

We talked nervously on the couch for a while, and eventually we got horizontal and I noticed the medallion around his neck, his initials SRO. "In New York that stands for single room occupancy," I said. "Hotels where people on welfare live. Or it's Standing Room Only, like on Broadway. Where'd you get it?"

"My boyfriend gave it to me." I tried to act cool. Inside, I thought, hey, I thought I was supposed to be your boyfriend. I turned the medallion over. TO SEAN WITH LOVE FOREVER, GLENN.

"Glenn from here?" I asked. He'd mentioned him a couple of times.

"Yeah." We stayed horizontal for a while, but I was pissed ­ although, as usual, I made sure I hid it. I always felt he was too fragile to get mad at. Some things I couldn't bring myself to talk about with Sean. Like his father.

At first, I figured his parents were divorced, but when he talked about getting social security, I realized Sean's father had died. There were other things he said, though he never mentioned his father directly, and I realized it was a hurt so deep I didn't dare explore it. I figured that if I tried to help, like a dentist filling a big cavity, I wouldn't be able to do any repair work and I'd leave the cavity open, the pain that much worse. It was cowardice on my part; I should have tried. Maybe this Glenn guy was a root canal man, someone who could help Sean the way I couldn't or wouldn't.

"It's not silver, it's pewter," Sean said, speaking of the medallion. "At first I thought it was silver. Is pewter good stuff?"

For a minute I wanted to kill him. Was he really that shallow? Then I realized he was denigrating the medallion as a way of trying not to hurt me, trying to show it didn't mean that much to him. I still knew this guy.

"I think that whenever somebody cares enough about you to give you something, it's good stuff."

"Yeah," he said, looking way. He was so damn beautiful.

And now, he's dead. And I'm still here, babysitting for my brother's kid while Michael's off scoring big drugs, and I'm staring out the window of CocoPlum at the Pink Pussy Cat Boutique. There's one on West 4th Street in Manhattan, too. I used to go to a little hole-in-the-wall restaurant called The Bagel, where there were only about eight seats at the counter, and eight small tables all stuck together, and I'd have great hamburgers and cream sodas, and I'd like having the owner know me, and when I'd look out the window, there would be another Pink Pussy Cat Boutique. I never went into that store.

Is pewter good stuff? The year I saw Sean was 1982 and AIDS was just coming into our consciousness. Before I left for New York that summer, I'd doodled a cartoon based on the S.J. Perelman classic, of two guys in obvious pain walking into a doctor's office, with the caption reading, "I've got Kaposi's sarcoma and he's got mine!" Sean chuckled at it, probably out of politeness. We didn't know anyone who had AIDS. What a stupid cartoon, and how stupid, stupid, stupid of me to have drawn it.

"At least you didn't have to watch him die," my brother said a couple of months ago, while we were drinking margaritas by his pool very late at night. Michael was trying to comfort me. The things people say to help each other are usually stupid but blameless.

A woman at another table is playing peek-a-boo with Rafael, making him laugh. The woman covers her eyes with her hands every time Rafael stares at her, then opens her eyes, only to cover up at his next glance. Babies love games like that; they start to realize they have control over other people. It's a powerful feeling.

I smile as Rafael smiles, and the woman smiles. "What a cute little boy," she says to me.

What are you supposed to say to that? If I say thank you, it would be like Rafael is my possession. Even his parents don't have all that much to do with his cuteness, and I'm only an uncle. If I say, "I think so, too," it sounds obnoxious. She probably thinks I'm the father. I just nod. Sean used to nod all the time when he didn't want to say anything, which was often.

I pay the bill. Rafael waves bye-bye to the nice lady, we get him out of the stroller and into the baby-seat in the car. Before I start the engine, Rafael says, "Itch me."

"Itch you?"

"Itch my head." He wants me to do what I sometimes do, take all five fingers on one hand and scratch his scalp lightly. I do it.

"I'm scratching you," I say.

"No."

"I mean, I'm not itching you. An itch is when you want to be scratched. An itch is a feeling, like when a bug is crawling up your arm."

"No bugs."

I nod. "Tienes razon, kiddo. No bugs. And no more itch, no more scratch. We're going to take you back to Popi and Abuela." That's Ines' parents; mine he calls Grandpa and Grandma.

I take the first causeway over to the Beach. Needing to see the water, I drive along the beach. "Your mommy and daddy are out in the ocean," I tell Rafael, and he starts to whimper. I should know better.

"Oh come on, kiddo, you've been so good all day… Look at the pretty buildings," I say. "See ­ the Cardozo, the Carlyle, the Beau Rivage." We are in the Art Deco district, all pinks and lime greens and pale blues, sleek curves and jaunty angles. I recite the names of the hotels, some of which are Yuppiefied, and some of which still contain porchfuls of the oldest of the old in God's Waiting Room. "The Delano, the Sans Souci ­ that means 'without a care' ­ the Prince Hamlet, the Ankara, the Normandie, the Sassoon…"

Rafael stops whimpering by the time we're out of the Deco District, and past the Fontainbleau and riding up Condo Canyon, where the highrises block the ocean and the beach. If they had wanted a worse way to put up buildings in Miami Beach, they couldn't have found one.

Finally, we get to the suburb called Normandy Isle, where Rafael's grandparents live on a big house on Rue Papillon. The first time I came there for my brother, when he and Ines were just dating and had taken a trip to Puerto Rico, Ines' parents thought I was a cabdriver coming to pick up Michael. They told me, in broken English, to sit down in the kitchen while they watched TV in the living room, and called Michael and Ines downstairs. Now, this is a big joke between Rafael's grandparents and myself, though I still feel they think of me as some kind of cabdriver.

"He was a good boy?" asks Ines' mother, taking Rafael in her arms. To her family, she speaks only Spanish.

"Very good," I say. I'd speak Spanish too, but I'm embarrassed to. Rafael gets a kiss from his grandmother, who says, "Say thank you to Uncle for giving you so nice a day. Digale 'Gracias, tio.'"

"Gracias," says Rafael, yawning. "Itch me." I scratch his head in the usual way.

"Bye bye, kiddo. See you soon."

It's 5 p.m. by the time I get back into my brother's Corvette. I decide to see my grandfather, who's been in the North Miami Convalescent Home since 1977.

My father's parents had moved down to Florida for good the year before that, when my grandfather retired. His business, and my father's, basically fell apart in the 1974-75 recession ­ but they'd been hanging on out of habit. My grandfather was by then 78, and he managed to drive his Buick down from New York without stopping. Michael saw Grandpa bound out of the car and told me, "You couldn't believe how that old guy started taking stuff out of the car, like he'd only driven around the block. Grandma, on the other hand, looked like death."

Unused to retirement and spending all his time with my grandmother, Grandpa ­ who hadn't spent a day in bed since the 1918 flu epidemic ­ had a heart attack in April. A month earlier, I'd seen him in New York, when he'd come up to testify in a lawsuit against a supplier he'd accused of giving him goods "of stinky make," and I'd been surprised to see him with a pot belly for the first time in his life. He recovered nicely from the heart attack, and when he got out of the hospital, I spoke to him over the phone.

"I'm going to start a whole new life, kiddo," he told me. "I'm going to have a different woman every day."

I laughed. The last time I spoke to him was during the July blackout. He'd seen the TV news and wanted to know how I was. My friend Avis was visiting me from Germany, and I felt embarrassed having her hear my responses to his silly questions. "Grandparents," I snorted, after I'd hung up with him.

Two days later, in a pinochle game, he made a stupid play. Angry with himself, he shouted, "Shit!" and keeled over.

It was another heart attack. He died. He was dead for four minutes by the time the rescue squad came and revived him. His brain had been without oxygen for too long. Grandpa was brain-damaged.

Nobody expected him to live very long.

I find him slumped in his wheelchair, in the room he shares with two other vegetative old men. I've never heard a sound from either of his current roommates; one is always completely under the covers, and the other never leaves his bed.

Grandpa, on the other hand, has been out of bed every time I've visited. After nine years, I'm used to seeing him this way. I've dissociated him from the man I once knew. Although I didn't realize it until a few months ago, I've never called this glassy-eyed old guy "Grandpa." I call him by his name.

"Hello, Ike," I say. He slowly looks up. Without his teeth, the lower part of his face is sunken in, and he never seems to stop chewing. His hands constantly rub across his nose, his mouth, his brow. Like the apes at MetroZoo, he paws himself constantly. There is gray stubble on his chin, the result of an uneven shave by one of the orderlies. Grandpa's jeans ­ when he was himself, he never wore jeans ­ are stained and have holes at the knees. His sneakers also have a few holes.

"So, Ike, what's new in the world of sports?"

Grandpa grunts.

Sometimes I can understand him, but more often his words are unintelligible. Before Grandma died in 1980, she had to see him like this for three years. Once she said to me, "He was such a distinguished man, and now he can't distinguish nothing." She visited him every day she could, terrorizing the pedestrians and the other motorists in North Dade; before Grandpa got sick, Grandma hadn't driven in a dozen years.

Because Grandpa had spent tens of thousands of dollars on her hospital care during the 1950s, when she had several bouts with cancer, Grandma felt guilty that she couldn't do more for him. She pestered the doctors with plans for brain surgery, psychotherapy, megavitamin therapy ­ all of which would have been useless. She brought food for him, stuffing bananas and chocolate and halvah into his mouth; back then, he still had his teeth.

Not that they got along all that well. They were always fighting. My mother would say, "If he says black, she says white. If she says day, he says night." They were constantly yelling at one another and calling each other names at the slightest provocation. "You moron!" Grandpa would shout. "Aunt Sadie died in 1944, not 1939!" "What are you saying, you idiot?!" Grandma would yell back.

Yet, she thought he looked distinguished. What is distinguished, we call love.

"Do you know who I am?" I ask. Grandpa looks at me blankly.

"Are you one of the guys from New York?" That's a new one. Usually if I tell him my name, he repeats it the way a child like Rafael would. Other times I've been Steve or Joe or Sam ­ names that just come into his head, I guess. Once, he thought I was his old friend, my other grandfather.

"Yeah, I'm from New York," I tell him. "You used to live in New York, too. Do you remember that?"

"Sure," he says, as if I were crazy for asking him something so obvious, sounding like my old Grandpa for a moment. How he does that sometimes, I have no idea.

"Do you know where we are now?"

"The Bronx," he says. No one in our family ever lived in The Bronx.

"No, not The Bronx. Miami, Florida. You like it here in Florida?"

"Sure."

"Play any golf lately?"

"Sure."

"Tennis?"

"Sure."

"Badminton?"

"Sure." I run out of sports. He keeps chewing nothing and rubbing his face.

"So," I ask, "have you had many visitors lately? Has Sarah been here to see you?" Sarah is my dead grandmother's name.

"Sure."

"Have your parents been here?"

"Yeah."

"And your grandparents?"

He mumbles something indecipherable.

"I don't know, Ike, you're getting pretty old." Everyone in the family says that if he knew how he was living, he'd kill himself. But he doesn't know, and instead of being the excitable, sometimes angry man I grew up with, he will now invariably tell you he is happy. I guess he's happy the way well-treated pets are happy. Michael and I had a hamster with that kind of disposition. "How old are you now?" I ask.

"Thirty-one." He always gives a different number. Where does he get them from?

"Hey, Ike, how old do you think I am?" No answer. "Look at my face and tell me how old I look."

I've got him to stop chewing and rubbing. He gives me what passes for a thoughtful glance. "Forty-five."

"So now I'm older than you? Jeez, where do the years go?"

"I don't know," says my grandfather. I pat his close-cropped gray hair, sort of the way I "itch" Rafael's, only without the scratching.

"You're okay, Ike."

"You're okay, too."

"Yeah, right." These conversations remind me of the dialogue in Theater-of-the-Absurd plays. But Grandpa's like a therapist in a way, because I can say anything to him and I'll never get a judgmental reply. Except for Michael, he was the only one in the family I had told about Sean.

("I love this guy," I had said. "Do you think I should marry him?" "Sure." "Don't you think that's strange, two guys getting married?" "Sure.")

"You know, Ike, I'm a very rich man." I take out my wallet. "See all these credit cards?" I take out two twenty-dollar bills. "Look at all this money. I'm a millionaire."

Grandpa smiles and makes a grab for the bills, but I keep them out of his reach. From past experience, I know he only wants to put them in his mouth.

"You used to be a millionaire, too." Now the U.S. Treasury sends him a monthly check, all of which goes to the nursing home.

Officially, Grandpa is a pauper. We transferred all his assets to my father and aunt when he first had to be put in the nursing home. This is how Medicaid takes care of things. You can't have any assets ­ none in the bank, anyway.

Edmond, the cute Haitian orderly, comes in to bring some fresh linen. "Sek pase?," I say. "How's he been lately?"

"He picked a winner again last week. The girls was kissing him afterwards."

The nurses ask my grandfather for numbers to play. They do this with several other residents, but apparently Grandpa brings them the best luck.

"Maybe we should ask him about the fifth race in Hialeah."

Edmond laughs. "That Ike, I wouldn't be surprised. Wait till the lottery comes. That Ike's got luck."

I look at my grandfather strapped in his wheelchair and say, "Yeah, he's a lucky guy."

But out in the car, I think maybe he is. He has no problems, no worries. The stress that caused his heart attacks is gone; that's why he's lived so long in this ridiculous state. And I don't mean Florida, though the adjective would be appropriate there, too.

Hungry, I mentally survey the contents of my refrigerator and freezer, and decide I'm not in the mood for Lean Cuisine. I've got forty dollars and credit cards, so I head across North Miami Beach Boulevard to Corky's to have dinner alone at their counter. Looking for something to read at the ten newspaper vending machines outside the restaurant, I get a copy of Friday's Wall Street Journal, but I end up not looking at it while I eat. Instead, I think.

The meal is okay. I can eat just about anything. I'm as healthy as anybody I know. Last year, before I found about Sean, I went to a doctor in Manhattan who was participating in the tests for what was then called HTLV-III, the AIDS antibody. New York City did the testing, which was confidential. I had to sign a consent form, but the doctor told me he advised everyone not to sign their real name. I signed my consent form "William F. Buckley Jr." Our blood tested negative.

I probably should have myself tested again, but I've memorized all the AIDS symptoms and diseases and haven't been able to detect any of them, except maybe fatigue. No swollen glands, no night sweats, no weight loss ­ which I wouldn't mind ­ or anything like that. What was Sean's first symptom, I wonder. I can't imagine him wasting away like the others with AIDS whom I've known. Maybe my brother is right, and I'm lucky that I remember him only the way he was. If Grandpa had stayed dead a decade ago, I wouldn't have to see him this way. And yet it's kind of a comfort to know the old man is still alive. He's 88 now, and my other grandparents all lived till at least 80. I could live another fifty years.

I hate it when I start feeling sorry myself. Compared to what life dealt Sean, I've lived in Paradise. I've had my grandfather's luck; he thinks he lives in Paradise, too ­ or The Bronx, anyway.

Sean wasn't the great love of my life. We were a dozen years apart in age, and we were together for only nine months ­ two of which I was away in New York ­ before he moved to Gainesville. For another few months, I deluded myself that we were still close ­ till Christmas and that pewter medallion. He sent me two letters after that; we talked once on the phone. I knew he was moving again, buying a house with Glenn, and I figured we could still be friends. But Sean left no forwarding address, no forwarding phone number, and after that last letter that he closed, "Good-bye, Sean," I never heard from him again, except once.

The last time I heard his voice, I was plugging my last book as a guest on a radio talk show in Tampa. When the host opened the phones, the first caller was Sean. He said, "Hi, this is Sean." God knows what I must have looked like in the studio: my heart began to beat wildly, I felt dizzy, I must have turned white. What would he say? But he asked me an innocuous question, one he knew I could easily answer, and I sputtered out an adequate reply. Somehow I got through the rest of the show. Apparently the host never realized how taken aback I had been; he told me the segment had gone very well.

As soon as I could, I called directory assistance in Tampa ­ which I'd been doing for months ­ and I again I was told that there was no listing under Sean's name. I didn't know Glenn's last name. For all I know, Glenn could also be dead by now.

The radio show was in December 1983, nearly a year after I'd last seen Sean. It was another two years before I found out that he'd died.

The only member of Sean's family I'd met had been his niece, the daughter of Sean's half-sister, who was about forty. Jenny was only a few years younger than Sean. I thought she was a pretty stupid girl; both times I met her, she seemed stoned. When Sean left for Gainesville, she asked if she could have his poppers, which he'd stopped using.

"What does a fifteen-year-old girl want with poppers?" I asked him.

"For sex, I guess."

"She has sex? She's a baby."

"Oh, she just has recreational sex," Sean said.

I hadn't understood what he meant by that.

Last November, I was standing on line for a movie at the Broward Mall (I'm still basically a New Yorker, so I stand on line, not in line) when Jenny came over to me. I didn't recognize her at first. She assumed I knew about Sean, and I can't remember what she said exactly but it struck me that he was dead. My mind didn't seem to be working any better than my grandfather's. The stupid girl never even realized that I hadn't known about Sean having AIDS. She said something about naming her baby after Sean, and only then did I realize that she was pregnant.

It was like the world was swirling around me, but I was on line for the movie, so I went in and got a seat. I don't know why I didn't just go home, why I didn't ask Jenny any questions. Basically I didn't have any questions. I barely had coherent thoughts.

The movie was the usual teen comedy; I don't remember it except for one scene where the hero's best friend takes off his shirt and the actor's freckled shoulders reminded me of Sean's.

After the movie ended, I drove back to the condo where I'd been living three years before, when I had known Sean. I had lived in two other places in South Florida since then. It took me a couple of minutes sitting in the car before I realized I wasn't at my current apartment. My old condo had a FOR RENT sign on the door.

• • • • *

It was 4:40 a.m., and he lay in bed looking at his clock radio. From the way he was lying, the digital clock looked like it said "Ohh" rather than "440." Over the radio came some Bahamian religious station he occasionally would catch. The preacher was saying that former West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt was the Antichrist who would require that everyone in the world carry a "666" credit card. It wasn't all that amusing, so he shut if off and turned on the television.

Staring blankly through Mr. Mister and Tears for Fears videos on MTV, he switched to CNN Headline News. A file clip of a ranting Colonel Gadhafi. Wouldn't it be wonderful to be a crazy dictator and have the world press cover your rantings?

That night he had made his weekly call to his ex-girlfriend Ronna in Manhattan. She was active in the labyrinthine world of New York City Democratic politics, and she had told him the latest joke about the growing corruption scandal. The joke was about Donald Manes, the Queens borough president who had plunged a knife into his heart: "What did Donald Manes, Rock Hudson and Henry VIII have in common?" "What?" "They all fucked Queens and died."

Where did these jokes come from? PLO stood for Push Leon Overboard. "No, thanks," says Klinghoffer, "I'll wash up ashore." The Challenger astronauts were freebasing Tang. NASA would replace Tang with Ocean Spray. Chicken Kiev has wings and glows in the dark. Waldheimer's disease was when you got old and forgot you'd been a Nazi.

Did his grandfather tell and hear Lindbergh baby jokes, Pearl Harbor jokes, Hiroshima and Holocaust jokes? Some people said these jokes originated on Wall Street and got spread quickly by brokers and traders through worldwide phone calls. That made sense. Wall Street needed to make sure the world goes on. Jokes say the world goes on, invest your money, don't run on failing backs, come on in 'cause the Dow is fine, everything's okay. Already Rafael's favorite word was "okay."

So, with CNN still on as background noise, he looked at Friday's Wall Street Journal to see where M-1 was. How the dollar stacked up against the yen. In the fall, in the wake of the Plaza meeting of the Group of Five, he'd bought $10,000 worth of yen-denominated travelers cheques and had already made a $2,700 profit. He'd gotten half the money from a maturing CD, the other half from cash advances on a few of his credit cards. A 27% profit, less 17% credit card interest, was still a good profit for him. He'd sell off the yen travelers cheques soon, even though the dollar would probably tumble further. No sense in being greedy. You could make a profit only in the short run. In the long run, who knew?

"In the long run we are all dead," said John Maynard Keynes in response to the classical economists who said you'd always have full employment in the long run. How is it no one before him realized the simplicity of that? In the long run all of us are dead. Lord Keynes probably would have understood why he had liked Sean. Oh kiddo, I can see you now with that smile of yours, the braces on your teeth making you seem cuter and more vulnerable. It's dark and we're in my car, parked by the beach in Fort Lauderdale. "Hey," you say, "if Fort Lauderdale is the Venice of America, does that make Venice the Fort Lauderdale of Italy?"

Death in Venice. Mann's composer having a heart attack on the beach, the last thing he sees is that beautiful boy. One fall, he and Ronna had gone up to the Berkshires to see the foliage, and they'd seen a dead deer on the highway near Lenox. Police cars had blocked off traffic. A car had hit the animal, they'd supposed. "Venison death," he had said to Ronna as they passed by. She didn't chuckle. Another joke. Another story.

Vaguely he remembered Joyce's "The Dead," the last part, where the hero ­ was his name Gabriel Kolko, or was than an economics teacher he'd had in college? ­ Gabriel Something ­ can't sleep and he looks out at the snow falling, and wonders about his wife's dead lover Michael Furey. There was no snow in the centerless suburban sprawl of Miami.

In his last letter before he disappeared (no forwarding address, no new phone), Sean had written chattily, impersonally, about an Easter trip on People Express to Vermont, to see Glenn's parents: "One day we took a drive and it was incredibly cold. I think I actually saw some snow!" Sean, a Florida kid, had never seen snow.

"Oh yeah?" Sean would always say, looking up at him, narrowing his eyes, pouting slightly. "Oh yeah?"

"Yeah!" he'd say back, like they were arguing. They never did argue. He usually called Sean "kiddo" or "babes" or "Irish."

"How come you call me 'Irish'?"

"When you're name's Sean, kiddo, you have to put up with stuff like that. Besides, that's what Danny Thomas called his wife in Make Room for Daddy."

"Marlo Thomas' mother?"

"No, silly, the actress who played his wife. Sometimes I find it hard to believe they let a guy like you in Mensa."

"I'm only a kid…" He was nineteen. Once he'd asked Sean how he realized he was gay.

"Because I was attracted to men, of course." It was that simple. On CNN Headline News, Colonel Ghadafi was back on, repeating his threats of the previous half-hour. When Sean realized he was gay, he took the test for Mensa, passed it, and put an ad in their journal saying he was sixteen and gay and confused and looking for guys to write to. He got a lot of letters back. "One guy was a math teacher and he kept giving me problems to solve."

But, Sean also heard from a seventeen-year-old, a guy named Ryan in Harrisburg. They wrote each other almost every day and then started talking on the phone. Neither of them had ever had sex before. They decided to meet, and they checked a map and made plans to get to Charlotte, North Carolina, by bus. Charlotte was halfway between Pennsylvania and South Florida.

They spent about three days in their room in the Radisson downtown. Sean bought Ryan a new wallet at Belk's, because Ryan didn't have a wallet. Before they left, Ryan took a pair of scissors and cut off a few of Sean's chest hairs ­ he didn't have many ­ and put them in an envelope.

Perhaps Ryan still had the envelope ­ if he wasn't also dead.

"Melodrama," he said aloud, as he shut off the news. His voice, and even the click of the TV, made a surprisingly substantial sound at that hour of the morning.

Daylight was coming, and he still hadn't fallen asleep. Again he thought of Sean's last letter from Gainesville, the one in which he had mentioned possibly seeing snow. The letter ended: "We've got a deal on a house in Tampa that looks like it's gonna go through!… So life goes on…Goodbye, Sean."

"Goodbye?" he'd thought three years before, when he'd first read the letter. What happened to "Love forever"? Maybe it wasn't forever. Was anything forever? Is pewter good stuff? What streets are colored people allowed to walk on? Are you one of the guys from New York?

Itch me.

Getting up from bed in one of their afternoons together, Sean looked at him and said, "I wonder how you think."

"You mean you wonder what I'm thinking about now?"

"No, I was wondering how you think, the process… I mean, I know how I think. I just can't figure out how you do it."

"Me neither."

They laughed and took a shower together.

He never dreamed about Sean, had a very hard time conjuring up Sean's face. Ronna said that when he talked about Sean, he always "glowed." "I glow when I talk about you, too," he told her. But he could call Ronna up in New York and meet her for brunch when he was in town, and they could go to the movies and share jokes, and hang out and gossip. He'd never see Sean again. He didn't have a photograph. (The one time he'd been at Sean's, to pick up his birthday present, he saw a little photograph of Ryan taped to the mirror along with the usual junk.) He didn't have a videotape of Sean, an audiotape of Sean; all he had were about a dozen letters and a playfully suggestive birthday card.

Once Sean had told him, "I'm gonna make a lot of money so I can support you in your old age."

Wide awake in bed in Miami in 1986, he tried not to get upset.
Eventually ­ in the long run ­ he would fall asleep.

Insomnia was relatively easy to survive.