Free Train Tracks by Michael Savage Page B

still, an army surplus DC-3 that taxied on a tail-wheel from Newark. Tilted at 45 degrees, you felt like Buck Rogers about to take off on a space adventure. Until the stewardess, not yet a “flight attendant,” distributed those box lunches that smelled of cardboard.
    Other than being robbed in a fleabag hotel by a midget bellhop, who pulled some kind of trick on me by making my bankroll of eighty dollars disappear from the hotel’s safety box, nothing much exciting happened down there.
    It is true I got my money back by causing a bad scene, provoking seedy Orson Welles types to slowly close in on me in a circle, only being saved at the last minute by the Dade County blue boys. They came, mind you, because the midget had called them in an attempt to intimidate this Yankee into backing off on his crazy demands. But when the six cops arrived, as I say, I was surrounded by an assortment of perfectly fine carnival geeks, and the midget suddenly discovered that my money was somehow still in that steel box.
    Must have fallen down in back somewhere, that’s all.
    Charged with pulling victory from what would have been fiscal disaster on my first solo flight from the nest, I took my friends to dinner.
    And I don’t remember the meal, and that’s all I’ve got to say about eating in Miami.

THIRTEEN
    An American Gangster in
Spain
    Majorca
    T he first
respectable middle class “bum” I met was a soon to be high school principle from
Brooklyn who smoked “dope,” danced the mambo like a Cuban, “had” lots of women,
and walked with a minstrel smile at all times. Very dark-skinned for a
Caucasian, and with thick lips and curly hair, he was the Hebraic male version
of Abraham’s wife, Sarah, said to be comely and black.
    Anyway, Donny had just come back from a very
faraway place, where the wine, women, and danzóns were said to flow as freely as in Impressionist Paris days. I, right then,
decided to go there. That summer, or as soon as I could afford it, I’d go to
Spain and get over to Majorca.
    It was a converted troop ship, the MV Waterman , that carried my friend Marty and me on our
pilgrimage to Donny’s paradise island. Two years it took me to save up for that
trip. When we first escaped our moorings with deep foghorn vibrations not
matched by today’s jet whine, all of my past seemed to slip beneath my feet.
    This was going somewhere!
    The last person in my family to ride a ship was my
father on his immigrant journey to America. Turning around on the stern, drunk
with Marty and a couple of hundred other budget-minded travelers, and feeling
New York’s West Side recede as in a dream, I knew I’d cut the umbilical cord for
good.
    Out to sea and seated for my first meal, I knew the
next ten days would be bad news for food. Cheap German food served by surly
waiters not older than you are does not make for an appetizing prospect.
    So I took to sneaking into the first-class lounge
each night and heaping the tasty little sandwiches into my raincoat. Those ham
and other cold cut sandwiches beat the sauerkraut and potato soups served in our
class, but also served to make me impotent just when I met my first
international beauty.
    She was coveted by all the boys. Tall and pale,
rarely smiling, Karen was the daughter of some World Bank executive. Brought up
in Swiss and English boarding schools, she was the dream of every working-class,
would-be poet on that tub.
    The first guy to win her attention was Andrew, a
tall ugly screwball who imitated the French existentialists by throwing potato
salad at ship lecturers.
    After five days of this brilliant joker, we took up
together. Slowly at first, she telling me she liked me because of the way I
walked. Something about my feet hitting the ground in a positive, assertive way,
she told me in a Paris hotel room weeks later.
    It was all innocent hugging and kissing on the Waterman for us. I pretended to “respect”