I Sailed with Magellan

by Stuart Dybek

  “Qué tú quieres,” the kid asks my brother again, then lights a cigarette with a lighter snapped open like a switchblade, and blows the smoke in Mick’s direction.

  Mick shrugs: Ho to explain to guys who’ve probably never been out of the hood why someone would come back for a look? They’re all lighting up and Mick wouldn’t mind a smoke. In fact, he’s dying for one, but something tells him now is not the time to ask. He’s given up smoking since he burned down the apartment in New York he’d shared with Mirza.

  The fire happened only a few weeks after she’d packed a suitcase of her stuff and moved to her mother’s in Astoria. He still thought then that she might be coming back. True, she’d taken their borzoi, Diablo, but undergarments that retained her scent of gardenias were left in the laundry bag, her leather winter coat still hung in the closet above rows of high heels, and the tapes of music to which she practiced dance routines were stacked beside a boom box. She wouldn’t leave for good without taking her music or her shoes. Mick was counting on that. Those abandoned, beautiful shoes for which she’d shopped compulsively became his altar of hope.

  Mick had worked a double at the mob-owned clam bar in midtown where he waited tables and had come home drunk to his fifth-floor walk-up on Delancey. Head pillowed by the shirt and trousers he’d removed, he lay on the bare kitchen table, the table they’d swept clean and then made love on the night before she left. He hadn’t known that she was fucking him goodbye. He covered his face with a slip she’d left behind and inhaled the oils of her skin. The pearly fabric brought back winter nights when her bare skin made him feel feverish—they’d cling so tightly together that he couldn’t tell which one of them was trembling—and he remembered how the room would fill with the scent of gardenias the way it’s said the attar of flowers precedes stigmata. With an ashtray balanced on his stomach, and the slip veiling his eyes against the streetlight, Mick drowsed off to the reverberation of the boom box dialed to the Latin station: Tito Puente. He woke choking, blinded by smoke, rolled off the table and crawled along the floor between boxes of their belongings that were shooting up flames. His pillars of books were burning, and it seemed as if the ideas he’d lived by were burning, too. The scent of gardenias from the laundry was burning, not simply her underclothes but the fragrance itself fuming into toxic smoke. He could hear their possessions popping in the fire and thought of her shoes shriveling into ash as he felt along the wall for the door—the metal doorknob hot to the touch—and staggered out onto the stairwell in his underwear. His lungs felt scorched. He knelt, his eyes tearing as he gagged on his own sooty breath. Between spasms of dry heaves, he heard sirens and screams and suddenly realized the screaming was Leon, his cat, holed up somewhere in the apartment. He tried to go back in after the cat, but the smoke was too thick, the heat intense. “Leon! Leon!” he shouted to guide his cat through the smoke, then remembered the cat was deaf. From inside the apartment he could hear the radio still blaring, and even recognized the song “Hojas Blancas,” a song Mirza loved. She had the tape by El Gran Combo, a tape that was melting into lethal fumes of acetate. He could hear the jazzy, lilting chorus. “Están cayendo hojas blancas en mi cabello”: white leaves are falling on my hair. He heard Leon and shouted back, but only the Spanish lyrics answered—maybe he only imagined them mixed with the furious crackle of fire:

  There arrives a moment in which I feel very happy

  for the good I have done in my life,

  and then there comes a moment of grand repentance

  for all the errors I have committed.

  “You know that expression, tearing your hair out?” Mick asked when he told me the story. “Well, it ain’t just an expression. I didn’t know that was what I was doing till a fireman pulled me away and told me to take it easy.”

  I’d met Leon, a blue-eyed, white male Persian, when I visited Mick for a weekend after he moved to New York to study acting. I rode a train from Chicago, got in on Friday night, and Mick, who’d taken the weekend off from work, was waiting at Penn Station. We walked down Broadway, him toting my backpack and telling me how he’d found Leon at three a.m. on the tracks in a downtown subway station. Mick loved cats; we both did, as did our father. Sir never let us have a dog, but we’d had cats.

  “Cats, swimming, getting a bargain, and food—the man loves to chow down,” Mick said, totaling up Sir’s favorite things. “I think that about covers it.”

  “He loves to sing.”

  “Oh yeah, there’s that.”

  We simultaneously launched into a chorus of “Memphis, Memphis, Memphis,” a song Sir composed when Harvester, where he’d worked most of his life, closed its Chicago plant. He was fifty at the time, and moving to Tennessee must have seemed like salvation next to the alternative of being out on the street—the fate of most of his co-workers. Sir sang the song adding a blat of Al Jolson to his baritone voice, his idea of a Southern accent. The lyrics went “Oh, Memphis, Memphis, Memphis, Tennessee …,” repeated ad infinitum.

  We were on a fifth chorus when Mick cautioned, “Not so loud or someone will hear what a catchy tune it is and rip it off and then we’ll be in a real mess.” It was a concern of our father’s that someone might steal his song and get rich.

  We began to graze our way through the Lower East Side—a Caribbean place for conch fritters, a restaurant in Chinatown whose display window featured a swampy aquarium filled with croaking frogs, baby eels in olive oil at a tapas bar, giant clam in a basement sushi place, borscht at the Ukrainian National Home, Sicilian cheese cake at Venieros, palacsinta at the Veselka Coffee Shop …

  Grazing through an evening was a private ritual carried over from the times I’d visited Mick in New Orleans, when we’d hike the city from restaurant to restaurant or drive into the Spanish moss-festooned countryside, to all-night truck stops serving Cajun food and zydeco joints in Delacroix on the bayou, where the oysters were fresh off the boat.

  We were alternating rum and espresso on Mick’s yin-yang theory that an equilibrium could be achieved between alcohol and caffeine. By two a.m. we were speeding drunk. We hid our money in our shoes and, still schlepping my backpack, headed down Ninth, a street along which drugs bloomed like night flowers in the spring air. A shadowy gauntlet of dealers murmured, “Smack it up man, smack it up, dust dust, got what you need, got what you want, rambo, coke, sunshine …”

  We bought a dime bag from a black kid singsonging “sens, sens, sensamilla,” and walked to a fenced park off Avenue A where a basketball game—as much a symptom of spring as lilacs—was going on by streetlight. In the shadows, three drummers beat congas and chanted.

  “Does this weed smell like oregano to you? I hope we didn’t get rooked,” I said, employing one of Sir’s signature words for being taken.

  “Hear that?” Mick asked, passing me the reefer he’d expertly rolled. “They’re chanting the name of Obatala, the supreme divinity on the terrestrial plane.”

  “The terrestrial plane! No shit?”

  “His day of the week is Sunday, his color the purest white. Sacrifice to Obatala requires a white female goat or a white canary.”

  “And I always thought canaries were by definition yellow.” I took a drag and held in the smoke. It wasn’t oregano.

  “His favorite fruit is guanábana, and unlike Chango, whose offering is always rum, Obatala hates alcohol. His water comes from rain.” There was no stopping Mick now. He could go on reciting the secret attributes of the gods for hours, just as he could recite recipes, historical facts, conspiracy theories, jokes, verbs in a half dozen languages …

  Maybe it was the sens, but, after a few hits, my brother’s litany began to seem interconnected in a web of chant with the congaceros at its center. Car horns and sirens and shouts in the dark were part of it, too, threads of an invisible network of sound discernible in the way that the miles of spider silk connecting every weed and wildflower in a field become momentarily visible on dewy mornings at a certain angle of dawn. The rumble of traffic, the scu
ffle of gym shoes, the ball reverbing across asphalt, gonging off the metal backboard, and slithering through the chimes of the chain-link net, were a counterpoint to the drumbeat. It struck me then that such connections were the way Mick had come to perceive the world. He believed reality was coded and that there were wise men who could read its mysterious subtext, wizards who could discern the eternal designs beneath the daily chaos, shamans, all the grander for their humble surroundings, whose arcane knowledge could influence fate.

  “This city is so fucking strange,” Mick was saying. “Look up and there’s all these lights and even though we’re at the edge of a dark ocean, not a single star. Empty skyscrapers squandering electricity just so everyone knows that in the undeclared capital of the modern world there’s power to burn, and here, just blocks away in the middle of junkie heaven and hell, they’re calling on the ancient Yoruba deities. It seems all the wilder and more primitive for the incongruity.”

  There wasn’t much night left by the time we finally got to Mick’s flat on Delancey. Mick had told me about Leon, his deaf albino tom, but overlooked mentioning Mirza, so I wasn’t prepared for the sight of a woman asleep. The place seemed furnished in anarchy. A boom box resonated Latin music. Partially unpacked boxes spilled their contents, pillars of books piled against walls threatened to topple and bring the walls down with them. The only seats were at a kitchen table cluttered with empty bottles, plates that served as ashtrays, and dirty pots from some exotic feast Mick had cooked up, perhaps days ago. Beneath the table the eyes of Diablo the borzoi glared out like a wolf’s from its lair. But, unlike all of Mick’s previous disordered places, this flat smelled faintly floral. A bare mattress, crammed into what probably was meant to be a pantry, extended out beyond the doorway. A woman was asleep on the mattress, although given the surrounding mess, the blaring radio, the flickering fluorescent kitchen fixture, it seemed more likely that she was passed out. All I could see of her were long legs in black net stockings and red high heels—one red shoe, to be exact, the other presumably kicked off. The immobile perfection of those tawny legs sticking from the doorway made it appear wholly possible that my brother was bedding down with the bottom half of a mannequin. Mick didn’t seem to notice anything out of the ordinary.

  “You didn’t mention a roommate. You sure it’s all right for me to crash here?”

  “No problem. My girlfriend, mi amiguita, Mirza,” he said by way of introduction. “Mirza, meet mi ’mano, Perry.”

  The legs didn’t stir.

  “See,” he said. “She’s totally cool with it.” Then he dropped his voice. “If she asks how old I am don’t tell her.”

  “Why not? Why would she ask me?”

  “She’s very curious about my family. Don’t tell her anything. She’ll misinterpret it. We’re having our little squabbles lately.”

  For what was left of the night, I slept in my clothes on a musty pile of drapes wedged between boxes on the bare floor, with Leon curled purring on my chest and Diablo snarling, his fangs bared at my throat each time I shifted, futilely searching for a comfortable position.

  When I woke to Saturday, light was defogging the grated, unwashed windows. Leon sat perched on the refrigerator observing Mirza, who, dressed in a tank top and jogging sweats, stood at the stove with her back to me, whisking canned milk and cinnamon into a pot of coffee. From the pantry doorway, Mick’s bare, hairy legs stuck out over the mattress as Mirza’s had the night before. The radio played Bach, and the borzoi gnawed at something under the table.

  “Buenos días,” Mirza said, glancing over her shoulder. I was struck by how broad her shoulders were. She had the build and muscle tone of a gymnast. Her kinky hair was cropped short, dyed bronze, a shade that matched her skin. She wasn’t pretty so much as beautiful in a handsome way.

  “Good morning,” I said.

  She handed me a steaming mug. “I can see the family resemblance. Especially in the cheekbones. You are Yimmy’s brother.”

  “Whose brother?” I asked.

  “Yimmy.”

  I was groggy and wondered if Yimmy was some Caribbean term of endearment. “You mean Mick?”

  “Mick? No, Yimmy. Yimmy Delacroix.”

  “Yeah, mi hermano,” I said.

  Not only had Mick neglected to tell me about Mirza but he’d forgotten to mention that in New York he was no longer Mick Katzek. Later, he’d clue me in that he’d changed his identity and assumed a stage name for his acting career. The name had belonged to an old Cajun he’d worked with on the boats out of New Orleans, a man without any family of his own who befriended Mick, taught him how to make gumbo on a galley stove, to tie nautical knots, to cable barges together without losing his fingers, and to play bourre, a mean card game with dramatically rising stakes. Bourre was played each payday on the docks, and Mick also learned the phrase—Je bourried la vie foutu—and the attitude that went with it: I bourried my fucking life. Delacroix’s heart gave out suddenly on one of their trips down the Gulf Coast, and he was buried in the Seaside Cemetery in Corpus Christi, in a pauper’s grave beneath a marker on which the date of neither his birth nor death appeared. It simply read: JAMES DELACROIX OF LOUISIANA.

  His name was the last thing he taught Mick.

  “Di qué tú quieres?” the gang banger asks again.

  That the question is oddly formal and more insistent—“Say what you want”—is not lost on my brother. German and Spanish were his double major before he dropped out of Memphis State. Years ago he lived briefly in Mexico, just before the FBI caught up with him in New Orleans for draft evasion. Mick has an ear for languages. He doesn’t dream in Spanish but does lapse into it when he gets drunk. One of Mick’s many theories is that the fastest way to learn a language is to live with a woman who speaks it. “Of course,” he concedes, “your vocabulary will be a little skewed.”

  Besides Spanish he speaks a bit of German, Cambodian, Italian, French, Portuguese, Haitian Creole, Polish, Chinese. Not that he’s learned all those from women—our father spoke Polish, and in the restaurants where Mick has been employed for most of his working life English is often a second language.

  He got involved with theater by following a woman. She was strikingly beautiful, Mick said, her hair glowed with a sheen he’d seen before only on race horses. He saw her on a street in New Orleans and the song “Tennessee Stud,” with its chorus “The Tennessee stud was long and lean, The color of the sun and his eyes were green” popped into his mind. Humming the song, he followed her for blocks into the Garden District, to a bar where actors had gathered for an audition in the back room. When Mick followed her in, they thought he’d come to try out for The Glass Menagerie. Playing along, he read for the part of the narrator, Tom Wingfield, from the play’s opening speech: “Yes I have tricks in my pocket, I have things up my sleeve. But I am the opposite of a stage magician. He gives you illusion that has the appearance of truth. I give you the truth in the pleasant guise of illusion …”

  Mick had read only to the line “In memory everything seems to happen to music” when the director gave him the lead.

  “What about the Tennessee mare you followed?” I asked.

  “She was a beauty, but I’m afraid she couldn’t say ‘Pass the bread,’” Mick said. “Got sent home in tears without a part.”

  Over the next four years Mick played leading roles at most of the theaters in New Orleans, until he felt there were no challenges left there. Local theater didn’t pay the bills, and Mick, who was waiting tables, had never saved a cent, but he managed to put away enough for a one-way bus ticket to New York, and to stake himself for the month he figured it would take to get resettled.

  It was winter when he left for New York; he’d forgotten what real winter was like. He was crashing in the one-room flat of an old activist friend on Mott Street and running out of money fast. One night, half frozen as he aimlessly explored the city, he wandered into the Kit Kat, a strip bar off Forty-second Street, and saw Mirza dancing topless before a blue foil
curtain on a lilaclit stage. She was dusted in glitter, and the lighting seemed appliquéd to her muscular body. Instead of disco, she was dancing—writhing—to Coltrane’s A Love Supreme. If she’d been stripping to the “Ave Maria” it wouldn’t have seemed more sacrilegious to Mick. He watched spellbound, the sinuous supplication of Coltrane’s tenor sax aching along the byways of Mick’s body, and suddenly he understood that, in this glitzy low-life bar, her dance was daring to preach something beautiful and so, inescapably, something spiritual as well. Before the night was over, Mick, claiming he was a prize fighter, had talked himself into a job as a bouncer at the Kit Kat Lounge.

  My brother is a middleweight, not the typical bouncer build, but he’d actually had a few semipro fights in New Orleans and been coached by Willie Pastrano, the onetime light heavyweight champ. In a way, it was Pastrano who was responsible for Mick’s moving to New York. Theater types had repeatedly told Mick that New York was where he needed to go if he wanted a real acting career, and that his vague physical resemblance to James Dean was something he could cash in on. But he didn’t buy it until Willie Pastrano said, “Mick, I can’t keep training you unless you make the decision to turn pro. Think it over, because people will pay to see a white kid who looks like that dead fuckup actor James Whatshisface.” That was the permission—the omen—to start anew as Jimmy Delacroix, to move to New York in the dead of winter and enroll in the Actors Studio, where Brando, Montgomery Clift, and James Dean had studied with Lee Strasberg.