Native State: A Memoir - Hardcover

Cohan, Tony

 
9780767910200: Native State: A Memoir
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0767910206 ISBN 13: 9780767910200
Verlag: Broadway Books, 2003

Inhaltsangabe

The author of On Mexican Time chronicles his life from his 1950s alcohol-marked childhood, to his encounters with people from every walk of life in Europe, to his journey to the deathbed of the father with whom he never bonded.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

<p>Tony Cohan is the author of eight books, including the bestselling travel memoir <i>On Mexican Time</i> and the novels <i>Opium</i> and <i>Canary</i>, a <i>New York Times</i> Notable Book of the Year. His articles, essays and reviews have appeared in numerous publications, including the<i> New York Times</i>, the<i> Washington Post</i>, the<i> Los Angeles Times</i>, and <i>The Times </i>(London). His song lyrics can be heard on albums by Chick Corea, Al Di Meola, Chaka Khan, and others.</p>

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1

The memory has the luster of a dream.

In it, I stand holding my father's hand on a mountain at dusk. Beyond and below in every direction stretches the sparkling city where we've newly arrived: Los Angeles. Domed Griffith Park Observatory rises above us. My dad wears wing-tipped shoes, a handsome silk suit. The outline of his upturned magisterial jaw far above mine is backlit by the dying sky. Nearby sits a brand new blue Buick Roadmaster, in which my mother, dressed in a tweed suit, is doing her lipstick in the car mirror.

Dad's arm, sweeping upwards, seems to cradle the sunshot heavens as if they are a spray of flowers, embracing multitudes. Looking up into that oracular bowl of sky and clouds and emergent stars, which in memory is either the planetarium ceiling or the sky itself, clutching in my four-year-old fist a tiny crate of candy oranges to send to relatives back East, I sense heaven and earth to be conspirators, deeply in league about the excellent nature of things--as in the music-drenched climax of some feature-length cartoon.

Violet tints of dusk merging into dark. Spotlights scanning the foothills from below. Planes buzzing beyond. Smell of orange blossoms, sage. From some radio, "See the pyramids along the Nile . . ."

Then, a crack of lightning. Suddenly it begins to rain. People run for their cars.

"Mary Helen!"

"Mom!"

She isn't in the Buick. I notice an empty bottle of Gordon's gin on the seat. Drenched, we run around the parking lot calling for her.

"Senor." A man has found her, off the asphalt, a few feet down the mountain slope.

"Philip, my nylons," she calls up from the little ravine by the observatory where she'd fallen. Legs splayed, skirt up, garter belt showing, one black high heel pointed to the roiling sky. Fresh red lipstick smeared, confusion sketched across her eyes.

I look up and see my father's face, burning with rage.

This earthly paradise is infested . . .

2

Welcome Home, Stranger

The tan, featureless halls of LAX funnel passengers toward passport control. An orange-haired woman in a shortsleeved blue shirt inserts my passport into a machine and waits for the computer entry to pop up. She embosses a fresh stamp over the blue, red and black collage of wanderings. "Welcome home," she says, smiling. "Next!"

I lug my shoulder satchel past suitcases tumbling onto aluminum carousels, feeling a little like a piece of luggage myself: tagged with overlapping destinations, waiting to be grabbed by its rightful owner. A customs officer takes my declaration form, searches my eyes. "Has anyone you don't know given you mail or packages to deliver?" "What was the purpose of your visit to Mexico?"

I exit the terminal into tepid, sea-level air at dusk. In the taxi line I dredge my Mexico keys from my pocket and drop them into my shoulder bag, replacing them with the ones to the little cottage in Venice. In a parallel gesture I reach in my wallet and replace peso bills with greenbacks. The bicultural switcheroo: I can do it blindfolded.

From the back of the cab running north on Sepulveda Boulevard, I look up into the silver belly of a departing jet, close my eyes against the shattering roar, feel the wind shudder the cab.

Strange, how it's always the same. The closer I get to home the more displaced I feel.

The call had come only hours after I'd arrived back in Mexico. Nell's weary voice: "Your father fell again."

Abruptly the 1,500-mile trip began to play itself in reverse. I hurried back up Calle Flor in the soft, mile-high evening air, along the darkening cobbled streets, past the parish church. At Viajes Vert'z, Malinda was just closing up but in deference to my emergencia turned the computer back on and snagged an Aeromexico cancellation the next afternoon out of Le-n. I drifted back through the plaza among the roaming toy and balloon vendors, the milling teenagers making the Sunday night paseo beneath the clangor of church bells, the Atotonilco marching band pumping out its sloppy, spirited Beatles medley in the pavilion.

Four days before, my family had gathered, as we did every April, at the suburban Los Angeles home where my father has lived since 1954. Dad had taken in the birthday proceedings from his wheelchair at the head of the table in a silly paper hat, mugged for the Polaroids. He'd managed to snuff out a couple of cakwe candles, even croaked the lead-in to an old dirty joke whose punch line we all knew. Ninety four years old. A festive day. Now, this.

Does the true vigil begin at last, the one we've been dress rehearsing all these years?

Arriving back at the house on Calle Flor, I considered its likelihood. Since my mother's death seventeen years earlier (from "smoking-related complications," in the Neptune Society death certificate's reductive phrase), Dad had been enacting one of history's longer fades. So many false alarms, few real crises but affairs on chronic alert. All eyes on Dad: just the way he liked it. I'd urged him to move out of the big empty house and up to Santa Barbara where my sister and her family lived but he wouldn't budge. "You're going to have to drag me out of here feet first," he'd say.

The next morning in Mexico I repacked papers, books, laptop. I left a note for my wife Masako, in Puebla shooting photographs for her new book on Mexican tiles. I locked the mesquite doors of the old finca urbana and climbed back into Jorge's minivan. As we raced back across the Guanajuato plain toward the Le-n airport, the radio spinning Mexican ballads and American rock oldies, even the weather seemed to run in reverse, unseasonable rain clouds gathering along the low peaks. Thoughts and feelings rose and dispelled on the air: anticipations, preoccupations, irritations. This comes at a bad time. I have much work to do, a new book. Is the old guy crying wolf again?

But something in Nell's voice had said: this one may be it.

"He thought he was in Chicago," Nell says, greeting me at the front door.

As I step inside onto the beige carpet, the musty smell of arrested life hits me. The front door shuts softly behind. The rush to get here grinds to a tiptoed halt. In the silence, my head pounds with jet noise.

"Angela found him on the bathroom floor. He missed striking his head on the tub by maybe half an inch."

"How did he get to the bathroom?" Dad has been wheelchair-bound for months.

"We don't know," she says. Nell, an old family friend, has been living at the house the last three years. "Somehow he got himself up in the middle of the night and hobbled in there. He must have forgotten he couldn't walk any more."

When he first began to lose sensation in his feet, I urged Dad to exercise, keep the circulation going. But he doesn't much like struggling against physical adversity, preferring being taken care of by others. Angela the Filipina caregiver put it perfectly: "Your father is a worrier, not a warrior."

"When I found him," Nell says, "I asked him where he was. He said, 'In Chicago.' "

Chicago. It doesn't figure. Dad's from Connecticut. He did love to talk about taping an episode of the Jimmy Durante Show in Chicago during his radio days and meeting the Mafia figures the great comedian knew. With the years, as the realities of Dad's past became subsumed into myth--as he became a legend in his own mind, burnishing his bio, striking a line here, adding another there--it had assumed a brazen gloss: Famed Producer and Director of Radio's Golden Age. Had Dad been at some speakeasy in Chicago last night, quaffing bootleg with Durante and Capone, a memory (or invention) sufficient...

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Verlag
Broadway Books
Erscheinungsdatum
2003
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0767910206
ISBN 13 
9780767910200
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Auflage
1
Anzahl der Seiten
336
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar

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