2.20
Greetings from Havana. I haven't had a spare second to update this journal in weeks, what with my going on the lam to escape false murder charges for the strangling of Mary Schmich at the Trib's Halloween party--a soiree I should have known was cursed from the get-go when Chris and I arrived to find that all of the cheese cubes had already developed that hardened, waxy coating from sitting out too long.
Running away doesn't mean I've given up on clearing my name, though. Before I left town, I asked Janet Davies to take a break from her all-important work of pinpointing the top salons for microdermabrasion or whatever, and do some digging into who actually did this. I know it's a long shot, relying on Janet Davies to commit some actual journalism for once in her goddamn life, but right now it's all I've got.
I went straight from her house to a rail yard where I stowed away in a boxcar on a train headed south. Fortunately, it was filled with crate upon crate of Halloween costumes en route to New Orleans, where they can presumably be repurposed as Mardi Gras get-ups. Tearing into the crates, I found a red Wilma Flintstone wig, a pair of Harry Potter glasses, and a makeup kit I used to draw a big, jagged scar on my right cheek, thus rendering my appearance unrecognizable.
When the train stopped in St. Louis, I learned from a hobo named Doug, with whom I was sharing a can of lima beans over a trash fire, that the trains would be inspected at the next stop and that my hiding place would be discovered, so I abandoned the rails for the interstate, hitching a ride on a big rig with a talkative lady trucker who called herself Ma.
"What's your name, red?" she asked me, casting a sidelong glance from the driver's seat.
"Heidi," I said, thinking fast. "Heidi West."
I rode along with Ma through Memphis and on into the Mississippi delta, in spite of her volubly expressed, faintly antisemitic opinions on the Middle East and her frequent farting jags. We had to part ways in Natchez, however, because Ma had to make a stop out west.
"You're all right, red," she said. "Steer clear of Mexicans and you'll be fine." This was her farewell address.
From Natchez, I walked into the wilderness until I happened upon a rural juke joint, from which I heard issuing forth the galvanic guitar-playing of Coleman "Coleslaw" Roosevelt, an 87-year-old former sharecropper turned blues virtuoso. In between sets, I overheard "Coleslaw" telling a waitress--in that raspy drawl of his, a voice fairly dripping with the quiet dignity and indomitable spirit of the subjugated American underclass--that he needed a new road manager because his last one had "tore out" for "Nawlins" with his "woman." Knowing a thing or two about show business myself, I offered my services.
"I don't gen'ally give jobs to folks who clearly hain't changed they clothes since Emancipation," he quipped, "but you look like you could use the work."
We toured the blues clubs and honky-tonks of the Gulf Coast for a while before reaching the end of the line in Orlando, where "Coleslaw" finally gave up the ghost, succumbing to the same combination of factors that has felled many a bluesman: hard living, a chronically broken heart, and type-2 diabetes. Naturally, he didn't have any relatives or money and thus ended up in the same paupers' graveyard where Disney World disposes of unruly Goofys.
It was there that I met a group of undocumented Disney workers who were in mourning for one of their own, who had died of heat stroke inside a character costume because his supervisor had forbidden both breaks and mascot head removal. Ignoring Ma's advice, I rode along with them to Miami, where they planned to try their luck in the food service industry.
From there it was just a short raft ride to Castro's Cuba, where I'm staying with Irene Arnaz, an "amiga" from my dancing days back in New York. She moved back to this godforsaken island in the early 1980s and assures me I can stay with her until the heat dies down in the States. That's awfully hospitable of her, I suppose, but I sure hope Janet Davies solves my mystery quick because, as "Coleslaw" would say, "These people be as po' as Job's turkey." Irene is considered borderline bourgeois because her goat, Raul, doesn't live in the house.
ELSEWHERE:
My review of LASTmatch Theater Company's Feet of Clay is in the current issue of Time Out Chicago.
Comments