Travels

Miami, from a helicopter. Miami, from five hundred feet in the early morning air, buzzing soccer fields and trucks loaded with migrant workers and azure-blue bays flecked with sailboats, half-built skyscrapers glittering in the rising sun. A sudden burst of wind, tilting the ‘copter ever-so-slightly, as we dip over the beach. The sound of rotor blades muffled by Bose headphones; the pilot grinning in the face of twenty-mile-an-hour winds and saying, “Well, this isn’t so bad at all.”

Afterwards, a party at the Havana Club. Trying to wrestle down a fine cigar, rolling the ink-bitter smoke on my tongue and switching the increasingly hot stick from hand to hand. The kind of view out the window that you’d see from a low-flying plane. A cosmonaut training suit in one corner, like a prop from a Ridley Scott movie.

Then you’re back in New York. Waiting on a cold Newark train platform, already trying to assemble the story in your head. Juggling it with twenty other things, still.

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“Quick, say something fucked up.”

“Everyone you kill on Christmas has to serve you in the afterlife.”

“Thanks. Things were getting a little too normal around here.”

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Connecticut. Bitter little post-industrial towns, boarded-up factories and sad little houses, rising condos and pillbox bars, lone cop cruisers parked in the middle desolate parking-lots. New Haven, and out. The bitterness gives way to fields and hills still brown from winter-cold. An Old World weekend of red meat and interrogation, the sense that everyone is on borrowed time; a church service; a croquet game; three generations under one roof.
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