I took it in stride; when I’d left the house that morning, my mother had been confounded: I had been stupid enough to tell her where and with whom I was going. Her last words to me as I left were “Are you crazy?” for even she knew about Butch’s reputation for liking the wild side of things. Well, I was doing it for the two hundred dollars, and because Larry and Butch were my friends, in that order. (Unlike his two lovely sisters, Butch always had a smugness about him, and, as kids, our fights always started out with his making some blunt remark about how I dressed in cheap clothes, or how my “moms” couldn’t speak English too well, or how he never liked to go into my apartment because it “smelled funny.” The thing is no matter how friendly I tried to be with him, he hadn’t changed one bit.) But even if I looked at it as a job, I still couldn’t understand how anyone would take a huge dose of LSD and decide to get on a jet plane the next day. (Eventually, of course, I’d find out why. Butch had already dropped the drug at the bar when, out of some idiocy, he decided to call up his on-and-off girlfriend, a girl named Ellie, in Colorado Springs, where he attended college. She had apparently dumped him that very night — hence his sudden decision to fly there, though I couldn’t imagine anyone, high or not, going through the trouble just because of a telephone call.)
Once the plane had become airborne, however, Butch seemed to become more contemplative, hardly saying a word, coming down from his high, which was fine with me. To calm my own nerves, I ordered a few glasses of vodka and orange juice from a stewardess, which I sipped slowly, until I began to doze off; then I had a very strange dream. First the wispy threads I always saw inside the rims of my eyes—“floaters”—seemed to become extravagantly beautiful, curling into arabesque flows of script that implied, without using any language, something awfully profound and mystical; and then after feeling completely fascinated by some melodies that I had started to make up in my head, it all hit me: Lurching forward, I opened my eyes to a cabin that had begun bursting with florid colors and seemed padded with an expanding, nearly breathing, foam. Looking my way gleefully and pointing his index finger at me, Butch could not contain himself, laughing, “Got you, sport!”
A general note: I would not recommend flying anywhere with someone who, out of a controlling motive, would slip into your drink a drug like LSD; I can also assure you that a jet plane — reeking of fuel, carpet-cleaning chemicals, recycled oxygen, bodily gases, perfumes and colognes, airplane food, and, in those days of yore, cigarette smoke, which even for a smoker on that drug smells and tastes exactly like all its ghastly chemical components (from benzene to formaldehyde) — is about the least pleasant place on earth to be. And it hits you that you are locked inside an unimaginably heavy metallic projectile flying through the air, somehow held up in the sky. In that contained, inescapable, and claustrophobic space, I got the jitters so badly that I made it a ritual to go to the toilet about every ten minutes (or however much time) to wash my face and urinate, though at a certain point, with Butch really getting on my nerves, I locked myself inside for so long the flight attendants began knocking on the door to make sure I was all right. (I wasn’t and they knew it — from our blabbering and distorted expressions and strange reactions to simple questions, as when a flight attendant would offer a meal, and I’d answer incredulously, “Why?” Later, when we’d finally landed, one of them, a chirpy southern sort, remarked, “It’s not every day we get passengers like you.”
I suppose this all leads to a certain moment: sitting out in a field in Colorado Springs, perhaps that same evening of the day of our arrival and still feeling the effects of that drug, watching the Pleiades meteor showers with Butch’s ex-paramour, Ellie, by my side. I am not sure if that wonderful evening really took place a few days after we arrived, but she, who, as it happens, had also been sick as a child (a very bad heart) warmed to me almost immediately. (I am not sure which Hijuelos showed up, or to which side of me she was attracted, but we spent our nights for the next few weeks together, much to Butch’s exasperation — he and I were never the same sort of friends after that again.) What I do remember about her is this: She had long hair; wore wire-rim glasses; had a plain Danish milkmaid’s face; had a thin, not full, body; had a father who ran Rocky Mountain Bell; had some poetic aspirations; and had a former boyfriend who had taken his own life after she had rejected him (think she cried in my arms after telling me that tale). Her favorite musical was Camelot, her favorite group (unfortunately) the Eagles, and whatever she once had with Butch had lasted only for a few days, if that (and even then I don’t know if they ever “made” it — he had the kind of personality that was very hard to get next to). No startling beauty, she had a way of being that really touched me and left me aching over the notion of having to leave her. (I had after all, re-upped for school in the falclass="underline" Lehman College at night.)
Parting from each other turned out to be harder than either of us had expected, though Butch, despite having had to put up with the torture of seeing her with someone I think he secretly, or not so secretly, looked down on—me—seemed almost mirthful over the thought of her suffering. It really didn’t matter: I never saw her again, and if the truth be told, once again I am at a loss for coming up with a happy ending to yet another of my tales.
We wrote each other for a few years, then that stopped, and I really didn’t know anything more about her until about a decade later, when Butch told me, as he tended bar in his father’s place, that Ellie, for whatever reasons, had committed suicide — and as casually, with a smirk on his face in fact, as if he were reporting a baseball score. Sometime thereafter, Butch himself died in a car wreck, hitting an overpass on the Jersey turnpike while driving his father’s Cadillac at over one hundred miles an hour, possibly, as neighborhood gossip speculated, on LSD. That news was broadcast widely, incidentally, on both radio and TV because among his passengers was one of his former classmates at Colorado, Frank Gifford’s son, Kyle, who was badly injured.
On the other hand, despite my occasional sorry attempt at fitting in with the hippies, all of twenty-two, I passed a year working in one of the more incredibly sophisticated literature-nurturing jobs of all time: as a salesclerk at Macy’s department store. It was actually far better than it sounds, though the pay stank and the store had been going through a decline in those days. I have no idea why I turned up in their second-floor employment office one morning, but I do recall telling the interviewer that I had an aunt, Maya, who had once worked for them in the 1940s, and I suppose that gave me a slight edge. I must have seemed respectable enough, having cut my hair short for my job hunt, and going to college at night also didn’t hurt my chances, and so they hired me.
I’ve since looked back, dreaming about writing the great department store novel, though composing anything else but songs wouldn’t have occurred to me back then. My on-the-job training, which came down to learning about “send” and “take” orders and the working of an archaic cash register, lasted for a few weeks, if that, whereupon my floor manager, a certain tall and regal Sicilian, Mr. Trampani, whom I rather liked, put me to work selling curtain rods and window shades, among other household items.