28 February 2019

“Edward Grady Partin was a big, rugged guy who could charm a snake off a rock.”

Jimmy Hoffa, 1975¹

My buddy John finally reached the punchline: “Partin’s going to find out that his grandfather fucked Castro up the ass and called him Jimmy!”

Our laughter drowned the din of about twenty people chatting inside. Five of us were on my balcony, overlooking Balboa Park to our east: 1,200 acres of rolling hills filled with dozens of gardens, museums, rolling bike trails, lush forests, and the San Diego Zoo. Less than a mile to our west, if we were in the condo of my neighbors and friends, Carleton and Linda, you’d see downtown skyscrapers, the airport, San Diego bay, and a glimpse of the navy’s underwater submarine base and the SEAL training area of Coronado Island. It was late, and my friends were drunk.

Levi doubled over and spilled a bit of his beer, and Erin snorted like she does late at night. John closed his eyes and snuggled his Tecate, and his shoulders bumped up and down in silent laughter. Carleton stopped chuckling and stared skyward, pondering if there were any truth behind the joke; not literally, but imagining the traits that would lead people like Castro, Hoover, Marcello, and of course Hoffa kowtowing to Big Daddy.

I had recently showed my friends the pictures of my family in Time magazine in an issue focused on my family in 1964, the first time Hoover and Bobby showcased Big Daddy in media, and one of the photos Hoover chose was of my grandfather when he was younger, shirtless and smiling and sporting his boxing gloves. John had joked that the cross-dressing homosexual Hoover was so enamored by my grandfather that he assigned extra FBI agents and federal marshals to follow my family, not to protect us from retaliation by Hoffa or the mafia, but to get more shirtless photos of Big Daddy. Hoover also selected a photo of Big Daddy strapped to a bulky machine with lots of wires, surrounded by federal scientists in white lab coats and carrying clipboards, the second of a series of lie detector tests confirming, in Hoover’s words, reports of what Hoffa said behind closed doors. Hoover was trying to get lie detector test results used evidence for anyone who passed or failed, and wanted to showcase the technology alongside Big Daddy, but John said that was only because Hoover was into bondage (John’s words, not a historian’s), and that Hoover wanted a photo so he could fantasize about the the machine’s alligator clips hooked to his nipples as he asked Big Daddy to tell him again and again how Hoffa plotted to blow up Bobby Kennedy’s house and the kids inside. It was as good of a theory as any other I had heard. John carried the analogy to anyone involved in Jimmy Hoffa’s disappearance or President Kennedy’s murder, and when I told him Big Daddy worked with Fidel Castro and his generals, he added them into his tool belt of jokes during late nights on my balcony.

Hoover started at the FBI in the 1930’s, and after President Johnson, immediately after Kennedy’s assassination, extended Hoover’s term indefinitely, Hoover led the FBI for a today of 37 years. Though cross-dressing was just a rumor, there was little doubt of Hoover’s long-standing admiration of shirtless men, including dozens of shirtless photos of him and Clyde Tolson on extended beach vacations together, even after 1941, when Hoover was tasked to add “homosexuality” and “sexual deviance” to “communism” and other sins his army of G-men were to root out of the government and army. If anything, Hoover was married to his job and commitment to squashing communism. In addition to being the sword enforcing McCarthy’s communist witch-hunts, Hoover overrode his own sexual preferences and ran a legendary illegal surveillance program that allowed him to blackmail members of the senate and congress, supreme court justices, and probably even presidents who were more worried about public image than their convictions. He even addressed President Kennedy’s liaisons with actresses and models in face-to-face meetings, speaking with the stoicism of a man who knew that you either had to stop being yourself or ensure that no one suspected what you did behind closed doors.

The rest of the photos Hoover and Bobby chose showed Big Daddy with my dad, Uncle Keith, and Aunts Janice, Cynthia, and Theresa atop the Baton Rouge state capital building, pointing upriver to all the industry the Teamsters brought to Baton Rouge, and several photos of Big Daddy supporting teacher’s strikes and other labor unions in Louisiana, a true all-American hero who saved Bobby Kennedy’s life at the risk of his own. All emphasized his charming smile. Photos given to Life a few years later, when Hoffa was in prison and the Teamsters would need new leadership, showed Big Daddy in a suit and tie, with a serious continuance and on the phone discussing regional labor contracts, with a photo of Hoffa on Teamster Local #5’s wall, reversed to show shame. Life’s word-smithing magically downplayed charges of rape and kidnapping against my grandfather, the “small domestic disturbance” Hoffa would sarcastically quip about using “rabbit ears” for it and “all-American hero” until the day he vanished. Later, they’d show Big Daddy bravely ignoring mafia threats and attacks on our family to get him to change his testimony, and curiously refusing a million dollar bribe attempt from New Orleans mafia boss Carlos Marcello to recant his testimony and free Hoffa.

“Dude,” I said, wiping a tear from my eye, “That was fucking hilarious!”

Levi pushed his glasses up and rubbed his eyes. When our laughter dissipated, he popped opened a can of Tecate and asked, “What’s your plan?” he asked, making “rabbit ears” for “plan” with the can in one hand.

I shrugged. Levi rarely asks direct questions, and I rarely planned my sabbaticals more than a few days in advance, but he had asked a fair question given the party’s occasion: I was leaving on an early morning flight to Cuba, in part to research my grandfather’s ties to Castro, and I’d be gone at least a month. I took off three months, but if found something interesting and wanted to stay I’d have to extend my visa. I reached for a beer out of habit, but stopped. I leaned back in my wrought iron chair, put a thoughtful look on my face to Levi him know I wasn’t ignoring him, and stretched my shoulders and rubbed my neck muscles to postpone answering. I hadn’t thought much about tomorrow yet.

We were in a rare old building among the constantly evolving condos circling Balboa Park. Beside us, a historic building reportedly owned by a former president’s son but too expensive to preserve, was almost completely demolished to make way for yet another high-rise. Until that happened, my balcony had the best view in America’s Finest City. My feet were perched on wrought iron that matched my chair and made the balcony look more like the architecture of downtown New Orleans than the insipid west coast modern style. To add to the image, across the street was a large southern Magnolia tree, mixed in with palm trees and the invasive drought-resistant sycamore trees planted by Balboa Park planners probably 80 years before. The nostalgic feeling of New Orleans is what had attracted me to the place a few years ago, when I happened to walk by on my way to the Balboa museum of photography and saw the building’s owner cleaning out the condo where I now lived. A young couple originally from Metairie recently noticed the feeling, too, and they moved into a west-facing units next to Carleton and Linda. For the pot luck, they made Cajun crab stuffed mushrooms packed with butter, like we were used to rather than the healthier snacks of San Diego, and they contributed two six packs Abita beers. I put one of the six packs to the hard sided cooler on the balcony, the one with with a bottle opener built into the handle that sometimes doubled as a seat when the balcony filled with more people than chairs, and the other was in a beer-and-wine fridge by the dining room table at the end of my condo farthest from the balcony, where a couple of dozen friends and neighbors were chitchatting and getting to know each other.

The owner was Cranky Ken, an old-school guy who would be around my grandfather’s age, if he were still alive, and coincidentally the same age as the Magnolia tree, which had been imported along with tons of other trees from all over the world as part of some garden exposition. Every spring, a family of owls nests in its thickly leaved branches, probably a welcome reprieve from the tall, thin palm trees that otherwise lined 6th Avenue; they were imported, too, but few people know that without water pumped in, almost nothing lives in San Diego, and that palm trees hide their thirst better than Magnolias.

The owner of our building recently refused a $10.7 Million cash offer from Chinese investors who wanted to tear it down and build a multi-story building that would shade the sprawling southern Magnolia tree in front of us. If that happened, the 80 year old tree would fade away and die; it was already weakened from thirst in the dry southwest, and only maintained a few scraggly flowers rather than the skillet-sized and fragrant blooms back home.

Ken grew up working the docks of New York City. When he was probably 35 or so, around Carleton’s age, Ken already aging too much to meet the demands of a stevedore. He somehow scored enough money in the early 70’s to move to the relatively nascent San Diego and buy a few buildings no one wanted, before it boomed and became America’s 7th largest city and every piece of real estate quadrupled in value. I never asked where he got the money, and though it’s easy to assume he and the other stevedore swiped something big from a shipping container, or he did something with the mob, which is always likely in big port towns like New York and New Orleans, the first and second largest ports in America. Stevedores vide with Teamsters for dock contracts back then, because Hoffa pushed to have his Teamsters represent everything on wheels, and the docs had motorized lift dollies, but I never asked about that part, either. I was just happy he had the money to buy our building. The vintage red brick building was a bargain back then, and a few others Ken bough in what were then rough neighborhoods of San Diego, though Ken always emphasized that the worst region of San Diego was nothing compared to his New York neighborhood in the 50’s.

Ken loved San Diego and our nearly perfect climate with the added appreciation of someone who grew up poor in a city of muggy summers and frigid winters. Of all things he loved about San Diego, he most loved our building and the southern Magnolia tree in front of it. After the real estate bust of 2009 recovered, but when interest rates were still ridiculously low, a Chinese investment firm offered him $10.7 million for the building.

“Those chinks would have to pry this place from my cold, dead fingers,” he told me early one morning when he stopped by my balcony to collect quarters from the building’s laundermat. His accent was like you’d expect from an old dock worker from New York, nasally and harsh.

“This place will look like Central Park one day,” he cranked out another morning, waving his log of an arm towards the park’s lush forests, a rarity in Southern California’s arid desert. Had it not been for decades of irrigation and care, Balboa Park would like more like the rolling rocky hills of Afghanistan than Central Park; recent water restrictions were choking the Magnolia we both loved.

“People here don’t know how fucking lucky they are to have a tree like that. Look at those kids climbing it,” he said with a dismissive gesture of his sausage fingers. “Chinks, spics, negros, and wops, fags and queers: they all climb that tree now. A lot of Mexicans bring their kids here, too. It’s fucking beautiful. They don’t know how lucky they got it.”

His eyesight wasn’t good as it used to be, and I didn’t feel like telling Ken the hispanics and Asians were probably nannies of the mostly caucasian kids who climbed the tree; Banker’s Hill was named Banker’s hill for a reason. The dark complexions weren’t the immigrants of Ken’s immigration, people just off the boat who shared stevedoring work with people who grew up in old-school New York, like Ken had. Many were Indian software engineers, brought over by Qualcomm on work visas that made them wealthy by India’s standards but at around half the salary of local engineers from the UCSD Jacob Irvin School of Engineering, ironically created by the founder of Qualcomm; almost every cell phone in the world used a Qualcomm chip, and the company did well. They sponsored Qualcomm Stadium, the area in Mission Valley that held concerts, sporting events, and, once a year, the LSU alumni association crawfish boil, when a fleet of 18 wheeler trucks brought crawfish from Louisiana and fed 36,000 people, the largest crawfish boil in America outside of Louisiana. Agriculture land disappeared every day to make way for tech and biotech companies, and immigration changed to bring in guys with laptops instead of shovels.

San Diego did have immigrants and refugees of Ken’s imagination a few miles away in City Heights, a densely packed community of around 95,000 people, mostly immigrants and refugees from around the world as part of federal humanitarian campaigns. The median income for a family of four in City Heights was only $24,000, less than the monthly interest rates on my neighbor’s high-rise condo, so few of those immigrants lived in Banker’s Hill. Ken owned another building in City Heights, too, filled mostly with multiple Section 8 families crammed into single bedrooms despite Section 8 laws forbidding it. Ken didn’t fret about laws as long as tenants paid their rent on time and didn’t call him to complain about fixing simple things, or didn’t have neighbors calling to complain about noise or smells. City Heights was a methamphetamine hub that needed anti-flu pills from any pharmacy and less than $30 in equipment, and you could smell meth cooking in some buildings from a block away. I suspected that Ken’s relatively lax Section 8 oversight, but blind eye and strict eviction policies, kept the meth out of his buildings. He was color blind to every color but green, and he accepted rent in cash that smelled of a janitor’s cleaning solution or a short-order cooks grease without asking questions. In Ken’s world, you did what you had to do to pay bills, and as long as your rent was on time there was no problem.

I was unsure how Ken differentiated between spics and Mexicans, but San Diego’s population was around 42% hispanic and overwhelmingly from Mexico, especially with the border only a flat 16 mile bike ride away, or a quick trip from downtown via the Red Line. Downtown was down the hill from our building, a steep hill lined with more and more high-rises every year. As for queers, at the other end of Banker’s Hill was Hillcrest, America’s second largest gay and transgender community and home of the world’s largest rainbow flag, perched above a brewery with beers named “Thick and Stout,” “Pearl Necklace Pale Ale,” and a Sunday brunch with bottomless mimosas that took on a whole new meaning when bartenders wore ass-less leather chaps. Hoover would have loved it. I was in front of enough college kids every day to know that the lexicon of Ken’s generation was frowned upon now, but I knew what he meant; he was a product of his generation, and he used words we wouldn’t use today, and even the most progressive of college kids forgives people who use words from their native language.

Hoffa, in his first autobiography, told America that my grandfather raped a Negro girl. In Hoffa’s trial for jury tampering, even Chief Justice Earl Warren called the man my grandfather was supposed to bribe a Negro, as if that affected the choice. Hoover called Martin Luther King Junior “the most dangerous Negro” in America, believing that America’s social harmony depended on keeping African Americans low in social hierarchy. Bobby Kennedy, notoriously at odds with Hoover after President Kennedy made his young little brother Hoover’s boss, followed his brother’s cries for racial justice, but held open disdain for homosexuality and called Hoover a “cocksucker” and a list of jaunts that would cause outrage today. Adjectives seemed to mean a lot to Ken’s generation, which many caucasian men his age dubbed the greatest generation, with a 1998 book by the noteworthy journalist, Tom Brokow, about people who grew up in the Great Depression and were shaped by WWII, entitled “The Greatest Generation.” For fun, just to watch him explode, I sometimes reminded Cranky Ken that Hoover was a closet homosexual, fairy, transexual, pillow-biter, or whatever word would ignite Ken’s fuse, not because Ken cared what people did behind closed doors, but because he railed against hypocrisy.

Cranky Ken had alert pitbull eyes with a tenacious focus when he talked, and he had a permanent frown framed by disproportionately large jowls that somehow held their shape whenever he blew up and ranted about something that upset him. He was the type of person most people didn’t want to start a long conversation with, and you definitely never corrected his view of the world, unless you wanted to hear what a 15,000 pound bomb sounds like. When he learned that I was leading a course on entrepreneurship, he scoffed and said I should tell those “rich college kids” that I lived in a building owned by someone without a degree. He was sincere, and he had a point that I used in class, but if you didn’t know Ken you could assume he was being mean. To him, and a lot of his generation that looked up to the uneducated but immensely powerful Hoffa, they viewed the privledged Kennedy’s with scorn, especially Bobby, who bore the brunt of Hoffa’s rage because of his Harvard law degree and President Kennedy’s nepotism for appointing him to America’s highest legal position when Bobby was only 35 years old. Every time Ken saw one of my books about the Kennedys that called them Camelot or America’s Royal Family, he scoffed and agreed with Hoffa that Bobby was “a snot nosed little brat.” In history, when we read that the Kennedys were adored, we forget that a lot of people felt the exact opposite, the same way we have split politics today. One of the main reasons Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas was that so many right-wing people there were so openly toxic in their disdain of Kennedy and what they viewed as his socialist, “nigger loving” polices that it was easier to find patsies; in some photos that made the news, southern members of the State’s Rights Party lynched effigies of Hoover and Bobby, blatantly labeled with their names. If you picked the right town, it was less about orchestrating Kennedy’s murder than facilitating it.

Coincidentally, Ken looked like Chuckie O’Brien, Hoffa’s adopted son of sorts. From what I read and heard, their relationship was more like a man empowering a young and loyal fatherless kid than a father caring for a son, but there’s no doubt they were close. Ken and Chuckie were the same age and the result of similar upbringings, and both had muscles under layers of age that hinted at growing up boxing in rough neighborhoods. Chuckie’s mom did accounting for the Chicago mafia, which is how most historians believe Hoffa started his connections. I never met him, but if he was anything like Ken, I think I’d trust him, and if I were in a tough situation, I’d choose Ken or Chuckie to be in my corner over any one of the waterlogged twats on SEAL Team 6.

Chuckie proved his tenacity in Hoffa’s 1964 jury tampering trial in Nashville, the one where Big Daddy was the surprise witness who sent Hoffa to prison. At the trial, Chuckie was sitting near Big Daddy when a gunman walked in the courtroom and pointed a pistol at Hoffa. Before security officers, Hoffa’s bodyguards, or the federal marshals hidden in rows of the open courtroom could react, Chuckie leaped across his bench and tackled the gunman. He landed a fury of punches, ripped the gun from the larger man’s hand, and pistol-whipped him with it; the irony was that everyone except security guards had been checked for weapons before court began. It happened so quickly that the would-be assassin was bloody and senseless by the time security guards could pry Chuckie off of him.

It turned out that the pistol was a pellet gun, but no one knew that at first, and after seeing the government-trained twats fail to do their jobs, Chuckie began patrolling the hallways with a .410 shotgun, staying awake and focused on protecting his idol and father-figure. Not even the Teamster bodyguards loyal to Hoffa had Chuckie’s love of what he called “the old man,” and that love is what hurled him between Hoffa and the gunman. Without knowing that, someone back then may have glanced at Chuckie and dismissed him as a nothing more than Hoffa’s gopher, which probably worked to Chuckie’s advantage when he took someone by surprise.

He would have done anything for Hoffa. Sure, SEAL Team 6 can take out Osama Bin Laden in a midnight raid, but they had the support of President Obama and a few hundred thousand soldiers and spies. Chuckie only had a .410 shotgun, a bird gun of the same shot strength as the .28 gage that, years later, Vice-President Dick Cheney would use when he made national news when he was was duck hunting and shot his 78-year-old friend in the face, doing no more harm than making Cheney the butt of comedy shows, turning Dick the Duck Hunter an internet meme, and having President Bush write in his memoir that every time Cheney walked into the oval office, the staff shouted, “Duck!” Cheney may have made it into the National Wrestling Hall of Fame, but he’ll never be revered marksman. Neither was Chuckie, but even without a shotgun he proved he’d tackle an armed man twice his size and beat him bloody with the man’s own gun. Instead of a team of SEALs, I’d gladly ask Chuckie or Ken to be in my corner.

I can only imagine what Chuckie thought when Big Daddy stood up and sent Hoffa to prison, but I have an idea, because almost 60 years later, even leading up to when he passed away in 2020, Chuckie was still telling people: “Fucking Partin. I should have killed him when I had the chance.” Chuckie stood below Big Daddy’s nipples, yet he was unintimidated by a big and brutal man who terrified everyone else in Hoffa’s circle, a handsome man who everyone trusted and followed at first glance. I had long since learned to not judge people by first glance.

I was lost in thought when John exhaled smoke from his Marlboro and pointed to my shoes dangling over the railing and said, “Dude, you have huge feet.”

I looked at him and held up my big hands and said, “You know what they say about people with big hands and big feet…”

I waited until a couple of the guys smiled, then I softened my voice and said, “It’s hard to find gloves and shoes that fit.”

Our laughter dimmed the dining rom din for a few brief moments, but was silenced by a siren sounding and blue and red lights dancing across the maroon brick balcony. An ambulance rushed past us on the way up from the way downtown, illuminating the otherwise dark view across Balboa Park. The doppler effect warbled as it passed us, and the the ambulance disappeared up 6th Avenue, probably on its way up the road to Scripps Memorial Hospital. In the relative silence and darkness from loosing our night vision, someone popped open the cooler. Ice rumbled and they fished out a round of fresh Tecates and Abita Ambers. I reluctantly declined. Carleton crunched his empty Tecate can under the sole of his loafers, which had a metal plate with a bottle opener built into the bottoms, and accepted an Abita.

“I don’t have much of a plan,” I said to Levi. “The part about my grandfather popped up last minute. I’m mostly going there to scuba dive and rock climb. I’m meeting an old friend and few guys I met in the Himalayas last year, and I’m meeting a friend in the state department to catch up and talk about Guantanamo. I’ll probably listen to what he has to say about the Bay of Pigs fiasco, and then go from there.”

Erin, a lady more comfortable with Tecates and Marlboros than the wine and California charcuterie laid out on the dining room table, exhaled and said, “Of course you have a friend in the state department.”

I shrugged and said, “A lot of my buddies stayed in the service. The natural evolution was some type of special ops and then secret service. I don’t really know what he does, but he hobnobs with presidents and religious leaders and shit like that. He’s still just a dude, though.”

John lit another cigarette from the butt of his last one. I don’t know how he does it. He’s a big guy, around 6’2″ and 240 pounds, and he works almost 70 hours a week as a civil engineer with a desk job, but he can out-cycle me when we ride 16 miles to the Tijuana border and back for beer and tacos, and out-paddle me in any type of surf. He and his wife are empty-nesters, and her loud laughter from the dining room would pierce our balcony now and then; she hated when he smoked, which happened after a his first six-pack of Tecate was crushed for recycling and he broke out a backup 12-pack that he kept stashed in the wheelbed of his truck. We had a lot of time to surf and sip Tecates because their kids spent every other week with their dad. John adopted his wife’s kids, but viewed them as his and anyone listening to him would never suspect otherwise. I had known them since they were pre-teens, and now they got old enough to join us in a bar now and then, where they’d ask us questions typical of their generation like, “Who was Jimmy Hoffa?”

“After 9/11,” I said, “my buddies bounced around all the new three-letter organizations. We’re all still friends and meet up whenever we can. I haven’t seen this guy in a few years, but we’re still tight.”

I nodded my head and glanced around and said, “It’s like hanging out with y’all.” Levi and Carleton raised their cans as a toast. I raised an imaginary glass and caught eye contact; they rotated their heads and locked eyes with Erin and John before everyone sipped.

I looked at Erin and said, “You’d like him. He reads a lot, and he’s into kinky shit.” She smiled whimsically and raised a beer; we caught eye contact and she sipped without breaking it.

John snickered and said, “Erin wants to know his shoe size.” She didn’t deny it.

I told Levi, “My visa makes me use local businesses, nothing owned by the state, so I’ll probably just start up conversations and see what happens. And I’m meeting a few guys there to go a climbing in a small town a couple of hours from Havana. They’re on a journalism visa for what they call eco or adventure travel, but they want to get some politics through the Cuban editors about healthcare.”

Blank stares. John’s eyes were closed, and he giggled as he dragged on his cigarette. I paused to see if he’d share the joke, but he seemed happy in his own world.

“We’ll climb in a tobacco growing region with old-school guys,” I said. “Vin-yal-es or something like that.” Despite living in San Diego for a long time and in Central America for a year and a half, my Spanish was, and is, muy malo. I hoped to improve it by having my phone off and getting away from tourist zones for a few weeks; if I had a plan, that was it.

“It’s a valley with limestone cliffs a couple of hours from Havana,” I added, “fertile ground for farming. Fidel gave up smoking, but kept the cigar in his mouth for the image. He visited the farms for fun and photo ops. He deemed rock climbing as an unnecessary risk, so it’s illegal, but he loved diving and set up dive centers all around the island, which brought in most active tourists. There’s not much tourism in Vin-yal-es, and the valley’s still old-school. Maybe someone will remember seeing my grandfather: he was remarkable looking.”

John’s guffawed and said, “Partin’s going to find all of the 70 year old Cubans with blue eyes who look like him, and go from there.”

John’s one of a few people know Big Daddy had sky blue eyes and strawberry blonde hair. Most photos of him in his prime are in black and white, and by the time people were used to color photos he had gray hair, and the poor quality of developing back then blurred his blue eyes to seem a dull grey-blue. In his prime, Big Daddy was one of the most classically handsome people you’d ever see, a smiling man who was tall, blonde, blue eyed, broad shouldered, and who had a narrow waist. He had a classic aryan look that Hitler and other white supremacists adored, which was part of why John said Hoover was enamored with him. I have Mamma Jean and my dad’s dark brown eyes, and I used to have auburn hair with streaks of red and no clear lineage of that. After a late night of drinking, I told John about all of the blue-eyed people in Baton Rouge, Woodville, and Flagstaff who probably didn’t know they were my cousins, and that when I was in high school and LSU I avoided dating blue-eyed girls, especially tall ones. I hadn’t considered that anywhere he went, Big Daddy probably caught the eye of local ladies, so maybe John was on to something.

“Hey Levi,” John said. “If you’re Fidel Castro, what’s your safe word?”

“You mean Raul now.” Levi said.

John said, “Yeah, whatever. What’s the safe word for a Cuban dictator?”

“Free market,” Carleton suggested.

“Hurricane,” Erin said.

“Rough Rider,” I said, and John instantly countered: “Dude, that would just make him harder than Chinese algebra!”

“Then he should use ‘Harder,'” Levi said, a play on our last meetup where John asked for the top 10 most poorly chosen safe words. We laughed for a minute, then the conversation stalled.

“What about Hoover’s safe word?” I asked.

“Easy,” Erin said. She waved across Levi’s puffy hair. “‘Communist’ would make him softer than Levi’s hair.”

She stole my punchline, but I was glad someone said it. When the laughter died down, I said, “I was thinking of using the climbing trip to write a memoir, sort of like Wild.”

“I loved that movie!” Erin said in her high-pitched voice. She calmed down and said, “And the book. I always wanted to hike the Appalachian Trail.”

I shrugged. I’m sure she meant the Pacific Crest Trail, which passed in the deserts and mountains outside of San Diego, and not the Appalachian Trail, which followed the east coast through the Appalachian Mountains. In Wild, the author was one of the early hikers of the Pacific Coast trail, and she explored backstory under the umbrella of her three-month hike along the west coast. Resse Witherspoon loved the book, and portrayed Cheryl in the 2014 film.

Erin exhaled smoke and said, “Why don’t you do it? You’re The Most Interesting Man in The World. Write about one of your trips.” She was a bit drunk, so I smiled and nodded and didn’t tell her she that’s what I just said.

Erin spent her ample vacation time traveling the world with focused itineraries so that everyone on her Facebook feed would know she had an adventure. When home, she hosted a huge block party after every year’s Pride parade, the one that passed my balcony and followed the equally sized but much more tame St. Paddy parade, and she dreamed of retiring from her architecture firm and setting up her own shop on some Carribbean island – any one, just as long as they still had beer. I don’t think she had a safe word. Despite her diet, Erin was an avid hiker, and she lived in Hillcrest so she could huff and puff Balboa’s five miles of single-track trails during lunch breaks. She hoped to meet a man who wanted to settle down. I joked that she was in the wrong neighborhood and attended the wrong parties. Her Pride party brought in a hundred gay guys in better shape than any of us – a commedian in the 1990’s said he didn’t want to be gay, but he wanted to be in gay shape, because apparently it took a lot of muscle to suck dick. At my parties, most of my friends were happily married. In Hillcrest, the biggest compliment she’d get was from cross dressing men who liked her shoes, and who also had no safe word.

She dropped her cigarette into a Sierra Nevada bottle half full of luke-warm beer and cigarette butts. It sizzled and extinguished. The smell waifed out and made me slightly nauseous – it’s funny how you notice those things when you’re not drinking heavily but your friends still are. John put his out and lit another. Erin’s a finger width shorter than John, a bit heavier than average, and can out-swim me. I don’t get it.

Erin fished another beer from the cooler and asked me, “Who was that guy playing your grandfather in the new Scorcese movie? The one who called you when they were filming?”

“Craig Vincent,” I said.

Blank stares.

“Remember Casino?” I asked.

Most people nodded or grunted yes. Carleton said: “Casio was a 1995 Martin Scorcese about Las Vegas, starring Al Pacino and Joe Pesci.” There were a couple of “oh, yeah”‘s. Levi looked at Carleton and asked something about how he knew so much about older movies; John chirped in and said those weren’t old movies, because we all remember seeing them, which garnered a restrained laugh from everyone but Carleton.

He was a film buff. Carleton and Linda were DINKS, Dual Income No Kids, about 15 years younger than the average age of our group on the balcony. They had just enough overlap to remember things like phones hooked to your wall with a cord, but they grew up with the internet and learning to find information and entertainment rather than waiting for it to come to theaters. Like a lot of young people in my neighborhood, they paid to live there and lived a modest lifestyle in exchange. They spent a lot of time in the downtown public library scouring old films, and browsing local vinyl stores and other things deemed “hipster” by kids their age. When I tag along, record store workers called me “O.G.,” Original Gangster. As anecdotal evidence, the hipsters would point to my hipster hat, coincidentally a Cuban styled bolero that was growing in popularity in all hot urban climates, and to my unplanned hodgepodge of tattoos that comprise arm sleeves, some so faded that Carleton’s friends assume I’ve had them since before tattoos were cool; that’s true, and I quip that I’ve had some since the late 1900’s, which always gets a laugh, especially from 19 year old college kids who were born in 2000.

A few times over the years Carleton and I stayed up late, passing glass bowls of high end herb back and forth in the predawn hours when Cranky Ken walked by to get quarters, ken would stop outside the balcony and chat us about old gangster movies. He didn’t care what people smoked or drank as long as they paid rent and he didn’t hear from them. He liked us, and Carleton joked that my rent was a song and occasional story. There’s probably truth to that, but Ken’s affinity for me is mostly because I’m handy with a Leatherman tool, and after I moved in neighbors stopped calling him to fix small things. He was a fan of Hoffa history, but I didn’t tell him many stories. Ken was remarkably timid when asking me what I remembered, and when I share a story it’s the only time he refrains from offering his opinion, other than to say the Brian Dennehy did a good job portraying Big Daddy in 1983’s Blood Feud, and that Robert Blake did Hoffa perfectly; enough people remembered Big Daddy back then that producers chose Brian Dennehy because he looked so much like Big Daddy, and Robert Blake because he looked like Hoffa. Big Daddy was handsome and blonde and blue eyed, and his personality made a lasting impact. It’s likely that someone in Cuba, which was overwhelmingly brown skinned and with brown eyes, would remember seeing him. I didn’t have a plan other than to meet people who would have been Carleton’s age in the 1960’s, when my grandfather was in Cuba, and go from there.

I said: “Craig was the big dude in a cowboy hat that Joe Pesci reached up and slapped because Pacino told him to.” Joe Pesci was an actor who fit Chuckie O’Brian’s stereotype, and over the decades he had earned a fine livelihood films portraying squat pitbulls loyal to a boss, and the scene in Casio epitomized that dynamic.

John chipped in, “Did he slap him and say, ‘who’s your big daddy now!'”

When I stopped laughing enough, I wiped both eyes and said, “I have a theory.” My smile returned to its resting state, and I said, “About The Godfather. I started thinking about it after Craig and I talked.”

“I reread a book by some mafia guy,” I said. “At one of the used book shops in North Park. I can’t recall his name – but he was the confidential advisor to Scorcese on The Godfather.”

“That was Francis Ford Coppula,” Carleton interjected. “Not even on the same scale.”

“Thanks,” I said. “Coppula. Anyway, the guy wrote something that stuck in my mind. It was off-hand, as if even he didn’t get it.”

My hand made a gesture as if holding something briefly, then tossing it over the balcony, and I said, “He was an intermediary between Coppula and the mafia. They wanted to be anonymous, but they wanted the film to show them as families more than gangsters,” I paused, not having articulated the idea out loud yet, and said, “I think they asked him to put in the horse head scene as a warning to Hoffa and the Teamsters.”

I glanced around and saw blank stares on every face except Carleton’s. He misunderstood the blank stares, and said, “There was a scene where a Hollywood film producer woke up with his race horse’s bloody head on his bed.”

Everyone grumbled that they knew that, but didn’t see the point. I said, “Hoffa used to fund Hollywood films with the Teamsters Pension fund.” I paused for effect and then said, “It was around a billion dollars back then.” The 1994 expose book on the Teamsters, called The Teamsters, estimated the pension fund at $1.1 Billion in untraceable cash controlled and dolled out by Hoffa. In today’s money, it was as if Hoffa were on par with Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and other Billionaires who run the world.

“He also lent it to the families to build Vegas casinos and New Orleans hotels.” I said. “But Coppula would have known about Hollywood and seen The Teamsters logo across the final screen of credits. The logo was two horses, Thunder and Lightening, from when the Teamsters drove horse waggons. They’re behind a huge, blue, ship’s steering wheel,” – my head cocked and I paused a brief moment – “or dharma wheel. It’s impossible to miss,” I nodded towards Carleton, “if you sit through all the film credits.”

“Hoffa was in jail then,” I said, on a roll, leaning forward and speaking faster usual, “and he was negotiating with Nixon for a pardon. He may have offered information, and I think the families were telling Hoffa that his power was through with them and Hollywood, and they were warning him to keep his mouth shut around Nixon.”

I inhaled and puckered my lips to say, “B’…,” but John’s face began to crinkle with expectation; I leaned back and slowed down and said, “…My grandfather wasn’t changing his testimony, and Life magazine showcased him against the mafia just as The Godfather was being written, saying the mafia was trying to bribe him on behalf of Hoffa.”

“Ignorant twats dismissed it,” I said. “They said the mob didn’t bribe. But they probably didn’t read the details of why Hoffa was in jail before flapping their lips. It’s no different than today. When the mob didn’t change my grandfather’s mind, I think the families were worried Hoffa would talk when he got out, so they had Coppula add the horse head scene to send him a message.”

For the first time that evening – and in general – John had nothing to say. Levi was looking up thoughtfully, and when he smiled I knew he connected the dots and saw a bigger picture. Even Carleton looked like he had learned something. Erin’s gaze was on me, and she was smiling as she sipped her Tecate. Levi smirked and fished around the cooler for a bottle of Sierra Nevada. Everyone refilled or relit. My mind wandered.

Beyond Levi’s shoulder, under the dim yellow light of a square, Spanish tiled public restroom across the street, I saw Mr. Charles bedding down for the night beside the men’s door. The year before, after sharing some red beans and rice and a pre-rolled joint from a nearby dispensary, I taught Mr. Charles how to pick the 1950’s-era lock and gave him one of my older pick kits. That year, downtown San Diego had an outbreak of Hepititus that slowed tourism and made national news, because it was attributed to the roughly 6,500 homeless people around downtown and Balboa Park, and every year some media outlet focuses on the homeless in San Diego and LA around elections. Giving Mr. Charles access to a bathroom after the mayor locked it was the least I could do for him and my neighbors. A few of my friends knew I fed homeless red beans and rice to people in Balboa, but none knew I taught them how to break into bathrooms. Erin said that I was a “nice guy” for helping them, but if that were true, Mr. Charles would be on the balcony sipping beer with us, or in the dining room, nibbling on some California charcuterie, commenting on its vegetarian, vegan, and gluten free options, and chatting with everyone about what makes something organic, or asking what they did for work. Instead, he was bedding down on the ground beside a public bathroom less than 20 yards away.

After some parties, I dodged cars on 6th Avenue and brought him leftovers and a joint every now and then. To not make it like charity, I told him the bag of weed was a gift from Uncle Sam; local dispensaries offered a discount for disabled veterans, and the VA recently assigned me a 70% rating. I received half off campsites in national parks, $1,317 a month to blow in a city where rent on a one-bedroom hovered around $2,000, and 25% off weed, an irony because my dad went to prison for growing it during Reagan’s war on drugs, and weed was still illegal federally and in 26 other states for reasons I didn’t understand. Mr. Charles had never served, and he no disability to fall back on, but he said that okay; on of my tattoos says, “Everything’s a choice,” and Mr. Charles agreed with it. I was lucky, he said, and he was not, but he chose not to work any longer. His body probably hurt as badly as mine from his decades of unskilled manual labor, probably landscaping or some other job now dominated by Hispanic immigrants, yet he never complained and was bidding another two years until he was eligible to start collecting Social Security, and he viewed Balboa Park as a free campground that was an better deal than my half off at national parks. I told him he was better off than I was, because I still had to pay for weed, but he got it delivered to him for free; that made him laugh, and Carleton kept telling me that things like that were what Mr. Charles saw, not that I never invited him over.

On the other side of the building from Mr. Charles, Mary was bedding down beside the lady’s room, barking something to people who weren’t there. I don’t know her story, but for almost two years she had never complained about life to me, which is more than I could say for most of my friends. Behind the building, facing away from 6th avenue and towards the irrigated forests of Balboa Park, two jittery transients I didn’t recognize were collecting newspapers and cardboard for a bed. I couldn’t hear what Mary was mumbling over the laughter bubbling from my living room, but she seemed upset at whatever she saw in her mind’s eye. Like with Ken, I avoided long conversations with Mary. The transients attracted my attention, if only because I was worried about her; the rate of rapes among female homeless people implies that talking to invisible people doesn’t make them too undesirable for some men. I usually kept my distance from her, and gave Mr. Charles extra rice and beans in case she calmed down and was hungry.

Levi broke my train of thoughts by asking: “Hey J, can I see your knife?”

I leaned to my left and slid the orange rescue Leatheran tool clipped inside the right pocket of my blue jeans, and handed it over with the carabinner and bottle opener side facing Levi. Leatherman’s patents on a folding plier and knife combination had long since expired, and they, like most outdoor oriented companies, seemed to innovate by adding bottle openers to everything they sold. He took it and popped his cap and tossed the Leatherman back to me. I returned it and adjusted a thumb tip with a small red handkerchief that I had put in my pocket earlier that day, one of the simple flesh-colored ones available at all magic shops that can hide a small handkerchief inside. There were bottle openers everyone, but Levi liked using my knife; it has a nice feel in his hand, which is much smaller than mine. I thought about chiding him for not using his lighter or an obvious opener, then I remembered that I never mess with Levi.

If it weren’t for Levi, I’d be the runt of our litter on the balcony. He’s a 5’4″ thin jewish guy from Santa Monica who can eat whatever he wants without gaining girth. With curly hair, thick designer glasses and an erudite demeanor, he looks like Malcom Gladwell, or like Seth Godin wearing a floppy afro wig. His personality matches Malcom and Seth, the type of guy who carries a thesauruses into a dive bar and has a brain full of facts about everything on the table. He graduated from UCSD in software engineering and began to focus on the then-nascent concept of cyber security, and has been in San Diego since. He lives east of Qualcomm stadium, in the more affordable suburbs, where his wife, a San Diego native an inch taller than him, stays at home and focuses on raising the kids while he puts in extra hours.

Earlier that evening, she lost their coin toss and took their two boys home in time for bed; that happened every time I hosted a party. Levi has two double sided quarters, and he alternates using the heads and tails to prevent the pattern from being obvious. His oldest kid is a taller version of Levi with a Hebrew name I can’t pronounce, and he’s a budding magician. Levi hopes he’ll figure out the double sided coin on his own. I said it’s a metaphor for everything’s a choice, including which coin you use.

Levi is patient. He doesn’t need to show off his double sided quarters, and as far as I know he could keep a secret indefinitely. He once hacked the bluetooth stereo in a friend’s new Audie, and made it play the theme song to “Taxi” when stuck in traffic by linking it to Google Maps’s traffic feature. The Audie technicians couldn’t reproduce the error or find anything wrong in their computer diagnosis, and that went on for five years, until the friend upgraded to a car with Apple play. Levi is still working on hacking Apple. And when we planned a magic trick for his office, Levi spent two years discretely asking for dollar bills in exchange for four quarters, ostensibly to use the dollar-only vending machine, but secretly planting quarters with pre-planned patterns of dates and states. When I arrived for a workshop on probability and statistics in machine learning, I demonstrated some of the points Levi had already made about predictive programming by getting his team of around 40 people to share their birthdates: two pairs were shocked to have the same birthdate. I gave a break where they could use their phones, and a few found out about the birthday paradox. I admitted that’s what it was, and said I was glad they could find it. Later, when I showed how subconscious biases influence our choices more than probability or statistics, proven by the remarkable difference between the states shown on quarters kept in females’s desks vs the quarters kept in males’s desks, no one could find an answer for how it was done. A year later, Levi says they’re more intentional in where they sit or stand at meetings, or with whom they go to lunch, so our deceit may have helped their team function more smoothly. He thinks long-term and he has the patience and precision of a deep-cover agent, which why I never mess with Levi.

He handed the Leatherman back to me. I accepted it and said, “I still don’t get the point of Obama’s entrepreneurship visa. I read that Trump’s already dropped it from the loophole.”

I spun the Leatherman around my palm and flipped it over a few times with a flick of my fingers to show both sides. I caught it with the bottle opener side facing away from me, and held it up.

“I think in terms of innovation,” I said, lost in thought. “A lot of people think innovation is adding more gadgets,” I nodded towards the knife, “like a bottle opener, and that entrepreneurship is selling your gadget. But I’d like to get people thinking about solving problems, not depending on the government to do it for them. But apparently that’s not part of this term’s policy for Cuba.”

“That’s what you do at USD, isn’t it?” Erin asked.

I shrugged. “Sort of. I’m more coaching teams that already have an idea and a prototype. We’re working with cross-disciplinary teams.” I nodded towards Levi, “USD just launched a new cyber-security program, and we’re linking physical products to it and getting kids to try innovating.” I looked around and said, “It’s like when Dick Cheney’s pacemaker got hacked by that kid; no one saw that coming, and we need products immune to influence, and teams that react quickly.”

I paused, realizing that wasn’t true. I wasn’t sure why I said “quickly,” because I meant with foresight, but the buzz words in education centered around catering to corporate needs about faster development, and I was probably absorbing and regurgitating their words without realizing it. I had always reacted against the word “react,” which rarely, if ever, led to long-term solutions. I made a mental note to stop, or to at least be more aware.

“No one knows how to train for the unknown, so we’re trying to get them focused on problem solving as a team rather than job training as an individual. It’s a mindset that’s easier to accept the younger it begins.”

As if on que, a little girl’s voice from inside say, “Uncle J?”

I leaned forward and slid my feet off the balcony and stepped through the double French doors into the living room where a tired looking eight year old girl stood. I took a few steps towards her, tucked my Leatherman into my right jeans pocket and held on to my pockets with both hands as I kneeled down to her eye level; the larger motions covered my right thumb stealing the thumb tip packed with a small red silk from the small pocket of my jeans. To further distance my right hand from action, I used my left hand to rotate my baseball cap backwards, a habit she’d be used to because I did it whenever I stooped to her level, so that the brim wouldn’t poke her forehead when we spoke softly. I didn’t need the thumb tip; I could make a small silk vanish from my left hand by sneaking it out the gap between my two middle fingers, but most people needed a thumb tip, so I kept one handy for teaching magic.

I rested both hands on my left knee, a natural gesture that hid the tip tucked in my right hand, and smiled and said: “What’s up, sweetie?”

I have a nice smile. I inherited it from Big Daddy, and it’s nothing more than an effect of our high round cheeks and the muscles that pull up on the corners of our mouths. I also inherited his neck muscles, which are thick and make an almost perfect 45 degree angle from under our ears to our shoulders, giving anyone who glanced our way the impression we’re more muscular than reality. But Big Daddy had thick arms and wrists, adding to the impression he was massive, whereas I have thin wrists and forearms that, in contrast with my big hands, make me seem smaller and weaker than I am if you see me up close.

Big Daddy’s thick wrists helped him escape handcuffs and ropes; apparently, he was able to escape from jail without any training. I had spent years reading Houdini books on how to escape anything, and was briefly coached under The Amazing Randi when he was on his crusade to expose pseudo faith healers that were abundant in the south back then, but when people tightened handcuffs around my thin wrists I couldn’t get them to slide over my wide hands. In escape routines, which were never my specialty, I learned to rotate my wrists sideways, the long axis, as if I were using my fists to leverage someone’s head down in a wrestling move, and I held them slightly apart without my face showing the effort it took; the gap was unnoticeable unless you were looking for it, and after ropes were tied with elaborate looking knots that became everyone’s focus, I could relax my arms and close the gap, then rotate my wrists and slide out.

For handcuffs, I learned to pick locks from improbable angles using my long fingers; I never mastered police issue, so I used cheap civilian versions in an escape act I did in high school, but the basics are good enough for old locks like the ones in Balboa Park bathrooms. As for combination locks, statistically, they’re easier to open; as a kid, I saw a lecture by a mentalist who secretly probed into people’s locked boxes to learn bits about them for an act, and he said that many locks were 1234 or 6969, a pattern that must have continued, because a cyber-security research study focused on human factors and showed that almost 40% of passwords fit into fewer than a dozen patterns that are obvious in hindsight; problems, they said, aren’t always solved with technology.

“Momma said you could tuck me in,” Hope said.

I saw Dana watching us from the corner of my eye. She was standing next to Linda and holding held the same can of Abita Amber that she’d probably been nursing for an hour or two. She had a smile that was softer and kinder than anything I could muster, not a resting smile or a genuine smile, but simply a smile that came from a source deep inside. She’s a finger width taller than I am, but doesn’t look it for some reason, and most people are surprised at how tall she is when we stand together. Dana looks younger than she is, too, appearing closer to Linda’s age than mine though she’s two years older than I am.

She’s thin and athletic looking, despite her only exercise after the army was hiking near her home in Topanga Canyon, mostly in Malibu State Park, and an occasional backpacking or easy rock climbing trip with me around Idylwild or Joshua Tree. She used to play beach volleyball, but stopped because it wasn’t as fun after she dropped out of college to pursue art full time, and after she had Hope her exercise leaned towards whatever they did to play together, which was plentiful. She worked in movie studios most days and doesn’t get a lot of sunshine, but looked tanned because her biologic father was, coincidentally, a jazz musician from New Orleans and 1/2 Creole. Her mother met him after he performed one night in 1971 at the then-new Baked Potato jazz club up the street from the Magic Castle, when Sanford and Son was still on television and Redd Fox was a regular there and Dana’s mom was into jazz and standup comedy who frequented the Potato. And, seemingly like everyone in Hollywood in the late 60’s and early 70’s, she was into drugs and recreational sex without condoms; none of us could fault her for that. The guy left the next morning and continued his tour, and he probably never learned that Dana was born ten months later. Except for four years in the army, she’s been near her mom and Hollywood ever since. Hope is light skinned and has brown hair, close to the dark auburn hair forming lambchops on my mostly grey beard, and when I visit Hollywood to perform and we walk around together, people assume we’re a family.

I kept my gaze on Hope and said of course. I stood up and pulled my jeans up and tucked the thumb tip back: it wasn’t the right moment. I lowered an open, now-empty hand, and Hope put her’s in mine and made a loose fist. Her hands were the size you’d expect for an eight year old girl, and I’m not tall, only 5’11” in the mornings (most people shrink around 1-2 cm by the end of the day because our intervertebral slowly discs compress under load and rehydrate overnight), but I inherited Partin-sized hands and feet that need XXL gloves and 14W shoes. My loose fist swallowed her relatively tiny hand, which made her seem even more petite. I saw Dana beaming in my periphery, and my smile broadened. It really is a nice smile; Dana said it was the first thing she noticed about me when we met at Fort Bragg almost thirty years before, the first year I started shaving, back when my beard would have been as soft as Levi’s floppy hair.

Hope and I turned right into the doorway of my office and library. The futon couch was open and made for Dana, and a plush car-camping inflatable mattress was on the floor for Hope. She had put her weekend backpack beside her mattress when they arrived, nestling it near her shelf on the right side bookshelf. The mattress nestled between two bookshelves that framed the new view of downtown, possible in the short time between when that old building was gone and the underground parking of a new high-rise was under construction. The bookshelves made the window look like a large television framed in an entertainment center. Through the window, I saw the lights of an airplane approaching for landing, and a moment later I heard the dull roar of breaking jet engines subtly rumbled through our walls. I stretched and moved my left arm into my periphery; it was around 11pm, so that should be the last plane of the night. After 11pm, the airport fined airlines $75,000 for landing, thanks to the people in Point Loma who bought during the 2000’s housing boom and woke up surprised that their multi-million dollar homes were in the flight path. Our condo, like most on Banker’s Hill, accepted a deal from the airport to replace all old windows with new noise-dampening ones, but the low rumble still made it through our wooden frame. I closed the black-out curtains and dimmed the lights, tucked Hope in, and sat cross-legged beside her mattress.

She tried to talk to me as she laid down, but she was too tired. She stopped talking and her eyes remained shut, and within two minutes her breathing was slower but still irregular. I’d wait until she was fully asleep before leaving.

Another airplane rumble rippled gently through the room. I straightened my posture and rested my hands on my thighs, and focused on breathing softly to help her fall asleep. Someone glancing in would have thought I was meditating; that wouldn’t be far from the truth, which was that I knew when my neck was hurting I was happier diverting my attention. I slowly moved my head as if bringing on ear to my shoulder, then back to the other side. The muscles were tight, and I had to strain a bit but still didn’t approach the flexibility I had as recently as seven years ago. I scanned my bookshelves.

The bottom two shelves of the right-hand bookshelf were for Hope and Dana. The bottom shelf had a short row of books Hope had outgrown one the years, mostly ones typical of her age and with a bias towards princesses and fairies, and a few drawing pads and colored pencils that were timeless. The shelf above had what I thought or hoped she’d enjoy while I was in Cuba, books like the Harry Potter series and some science fiction series about a kid a few years older than her who had multiple universe versions of himself to help solve crimes. I bought them on impulse after the cute young lady who worked at a used bookshop in North Park recommended the series; I had told her I was shopping for an eight year girl old who read above her level, and with some form of science built in, like Ender’s Game and other classics of my generation. That reminded me about Ender’s Game, and I added a copy of it to the shelf. I put a couple of maker’s project books I already had at USD, and a maker’s kit that I had designed for anyone from around age ten to a freshman in college engineering; it had typical nuts-and-bolts and wires-and-circuits, and I added a few Arduinos and things it could make move, beep, light up, or roll, and a couple of Rasberry Pi’s that, if I had WiFi in the condo, could connect to the internet, part of the “internet of things.” I was using to learn more about cyber-security, and technology was progressing faster than any teacher could teach, which is part of why I was evangelical about project-based learning. I hoped Dana would help Hope with the online parts; neither had ever been interested in computers, but maybe a shared project would prime the pump and get them to learn together. We were a mile walk from the new downtown library, and it had ample computer rooms and a respectable maker’s lab.

For Dana, I added a couple of the new Stephen King books that had already made their way to the used book shop. She’d have access to all of my home and books, but she liked popular fiction like Stephen King and a few other authors I can never recall. The lady at the bookshop recommended them based on Stephen King’s “The Stand” and his Gunslinger series, which he said all his books were leading up to and were not his typical horror stories. I had flipped through the books I bought for her, but I was so behind on other reading that I didn’t lean in.

The upper three shelves of that bookshelf were mine. The top shelf was mostly memorabilia, a small display of medals in a dark brown oak frame, and the Vietnam-era bayonet I used in the battle for Khamisiya, a relic when it was issued to me in 1990, but the only one available in the scavenged armories leading up to the first Gulf war. Next to the bayonet was a blurry photo of my platoon deep in Iraq a few weeks after the ground war officially ended, about 15 of us with a handful of Kurds outside of their village just before Saddam’s forces extracted revenge for them helping the allied forces, and probably because of his belief in religious cleansing. The photo was taken from a disposable film camera and blown up to 8×10, so it looked like the low-quality photos of Big Daddy from the late 1970’s. I framed it in brown oak to match the medal case. Like my faded tattoos, the photos antiquated appearance seemed to come from a time before mine, and sometimes when I looked at it, I felt as if I were looking at a character of me in another time rather than the version of myself in my mind.

Tucked into the display’s frame was a ratty business card that was once new and white, but was now tattered and grey, with stains from 3-way gun oil, six months of eating MRE’s in Iraq without spare water to wash hands, tar from roadways melted by bombs, and a few drops of blood from my first battle in the ground war. The card showed a black skull wearing a black beret as the face of black Ace of Spades, and it was framed with Airborne wings; Airborne loves to put wings on everything. Simple but classic Times New Roman font said: “I’m an American Paratrooper. If you’re recovering my body, kiss my cold, dead ass.” Ken liked that card so much he adopted the phrase to describe what Chinese investors could do with their $10.7 Million.

My gaze settled on the faces in the photo. Almost half of the 21 of us were gone. Several perished in Afghanistan, a couple were suicides (vets have four times the rate as civilians), a few were disease (Gulf War syndrome), and some were accidents (paratroopers tend to have risky hobbies outside of work). One had recently put the barrel of a Glock 19 in his mouth, standard issue for police, Rangers, SEALS, and federal marshals; he had been on my mind all month, and a few months before he died, I joked with him that I used a 17 because I didn’t have his little girlie hands. I shook my head and took a breath and exhaled slowly. Hope wasn’t deep asleep yet. My heartbeat was up. I got into sync with Hope again, then returned to looking at the bookshelf.

The shelf below my row of nostalgia was full of dusty fiction and nonfiction I planned to read one day, a combination of books like Sapiens, by that Israeli guy whose name I can’t pronounce, and Blink and Talking with Strangers by Malcolm Gladwell, mixed with classical literature and memoirs by a few presidents and average, ordinary people like you and me who somehow made art from their history in work like Angela’s Ashes, The Liar’s Club, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, and The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien (no relation). Three new books from Amazon were squeezed in, Mary Karr’s “The Art of Memoir,” Sol Stein’s “Stein on Writing,” and Stephen King’s “On Writing.” I kept them next to the pamphlet sized Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style; proof that reading and quoting doesn’t automatically make you able to do what you’re a so-called expert on.

The third shelf was mostly related to work. It had a collection of text books on engineering and physics, anatomy and physiology, differential equations and mathematical modeling; and a few pop culture physics books by Stephen Hawking, Carlo Rovelli, and Neil DeGrasse Tyson. I had some old lecture notes from Feyman, the quantum physicist who worked on the atomic bomb and was investigated for breaking into his colleague’s safes and leaving prank notes; it turned out to be a joke, and that he could break into the safes by predicting their combinations, which were things like the value of Pi to as many digits as needed, the atomic number of elements they were fond of, and other things obvious in hindsight once he explained them to the FBI. There were signed copies of Panjabi and White’s classic Clinical Biomechanics of the Spine, and Vijay Goel’s Spine Biomechanics; Vijay earned his PhD under Panjabi and was tenured faculty at Iowa when I knew him, but Panjabi was the O.G. of spine biomechanics, and pioneered using motion-tracking software to study cadaver spines. I still dabbled in consulting a few spine companies, especially because the new trend was computer-guided surgical systems.

The top shelf of the left hand bookshelf was dedicated to all five books in what fans reverently quipped as the Hitchiker’s Guide to The Galaxy trilogy, my cherished first edition of “A Confederacy of Dunces” from the LSU press, and an unfinished copy of Faulkner’s “As I Lay Dying” that I tried to get into once a year or so. There were a handful of Lonely Planet and Let’s Go travel guides and a few trinkets picked up from a lifetime of sabbaticals, including a hand-sized vajra, the symmetric weapon of knowledge that predates written word, with one side representing the external universe we experience, and one side the internal interpretation we create; they meet at the perfectly balanced center.

The next two shelves were dedicated to well used copies of sometimes redundant and sometimes conflicting translations of ancient texts like the Bhagavita, Upanishids, Pali Canon, Bible (old and new testaments), Q’ran, Tao Te Ching, etc. After a few years as a combat soldier, I was tagged with the title “communications liaison” and worked as an unarmed peacekeeper in the Middle East with people from 17 countries from other countries, and immersed into what most people called fundamentalist Islamic groups. knowing religious foundations is usefull; when I consulted for large companies, most had large teams all over the world, so the skills from my time as a communications liaison. Part of my role was technology of the time, because words had to be sent across whatever technology was available, and times and locations had to be understood by a diverse group of people; I was in the midst of the first GPS sattelites replacing the sprotatic and unreliable ground-based LAN systems we used in the early 90’s, and I was one of the first users of SINCGARS system adopted by NATO, Single Integrated Network Ground Airborne Radio Systems that hopped across radio frequencies around 100 times a minute, faster than could be tracked and decoded. I never studied cyber-security like my friend Levi, but I was a few years older than he was and had seen it grow from an egg, so I may have understood the beast at a deeper level than he did.

There were a few copies of Native American stories of different tribes, and a few worn copies of Greek Myth collections with conflicting morals of their legends; that’s were Hope’s namesake originated. In one version of Greek mythology, hope remained in Pandoras box – or jar, depending on the translation – as a gift from the god’s to help us persevere after Pandora inadvertently unleashed the god’s plagues upon mankind. In the other, Hope was personified as the most evil of goddesses, the ultimate cruelty from the gods, because Hope is what keeps a boxer who will inevitably loose in a ring, being beaten again and again for their amusement of the gods, as if they knew a wiser creature would throw in the towel and go have a beer with friends. I told Dana that story when she visited me during my final days at LSU, and it made such an impression that fifteen years later she named her daughter Hope, saying that with the knowledge of where her name came from, she would not be attached to one definition or another, and she could be free to make her own choices. Dana never read books on myths and legends, but she seemed to get the concepts better than professors who taught it.

The next two shelves had a curated collections of magic books, including several original and signed copies from Tommy Wonder, Chris Kenner, Troy Hooser, Brother John Hamman, John Rocherbaumer, David Roth, and a few others who made their way in and out of Baton Rouge and New Orleans on their lecture circuits in the 1980’s. There was a Harry Anderson book, too, but it was less magic and more bar bets and friendly con games; that’s where I first learned the birthday paradox, before anyone could look up the secret on a smart phone.

I sighed a bit. Harry had passed almost exactly a year before at age 65. After nine years as the star of television’s comedy series, Night Court, and eight times hosting Saturday Night Live, he married a girl from Baton Rouge and moved to New Orleans to buy and run a bar, Harry’s Pub. Like a lot of performers and many of my friends in New Orleans, he smoked and drank more than was healthy. He died of a stroke following a long bout with the flu, but it’s likely that the stroke would have happened no matter how healthy he was.

I moved on. The only newer magic books were the six volumes of Robert Giobi’s Card College and some reissued books on performance theory by Juan Tammariz, and two booklets with dozens of authors contributing and published by the owner of The Magic Apple, a magic shop located up the road from Hollywood’s Magic Castle. I had a few collectors books from a friend’s collection, like original signed Stars of Magic series from the 1950’s and 60’s, including a coveted Dia Vernon scribble, probably written with one hand while he held a whiskey cocktail in the other, wishing my buddy Steve good luck in his magic career. There were a few obscure pamphlets by magicians known in the underground, like Birmingham’s Michael Baker, a soft spoken artist with layered meaning in every routine, and San Diego’s J.C. Wagner, a rose-nosed alcoholic who could brilliantly entertain an entire bar with his wit and a deck of cards until he, too, passed away too young after years of alcohol abuse.

Because my bookshelves were stuffed full like a Thanksgiving Turkey, I added a few cookbooks beside the magic books, including my Granny’s roux-stained copy of Louisiana Kitchen, the one where he painstakingly photographed different rouxes at different levels of perfection for each type of dish: I quipped that turning raw ingredients into dinner was like magic, a play on Paul Prudhome’s “Louisiana Magic” seasoning products that were popular when I was growing up, and are still on grocery store shelves across America without anyone knowing who he was: a plump, jolly, uneducated man who loved his job and was the only non-Frenchman to win France’s chef of the year award. He cooked dinner for President Reagan and Prime Minister Gorbechov’s first peace summit in an effort to end the cold war, something I believe should have been publicized more than it was; even born enemies share the need to eat, and that can be a starting point for more common ground. Though not as high profile, in Israel and Egypt, I probably ate gallons of hummus and fava bean stew, and cooked barrels of pork-free jambalayas on rustic petrol stoves. Though I make my own seasonings, I respect that Paul was the O.G. of Cajun cuisine, and sometimes I curl up with his book again rather than tackling As I Lay Dying again.

The next shelf was bulging with worn and marked up books about Jimmy Hoffa, the Mafia, and the Kennedy’s, curated from used bookshops over the years and more than 2,000 available on Amazon. Most were crap. I keep a bunch on my e-reader because I can search for names; there are probably 10,000 names to keep track of in all of that history; Walter Sheridan’s index of names in “The Fall and Rise of Jimmy Hoffa” has more pages than most people’s books on the subject. Most experts contradict each other, and some books evolved and were reprinted as new editions with new knowledge, and contradicted their first versions. I had Granny’s original copies of both of Hoffa’s autobiographies, the one he penned in prison in 1968 and the one published just before he vanished in 1975; about a third of both were focused on my grandfather, and, unlike Chucky’s comments, both showed that Hoffa maintained respect for my grandfather even after spending six years in federal prison based solely on Big Daddy’s word; that perplexed Craig Vincent, yet none of the so-called professional investigators over the past half a century seemed to pay attention to it. To me, it seems anyone who knew Hoffa’s notorious rage and sharp tongue would wonder why he had benign words for the man who betrayed him and sent him to prison.

My gaze slid from the bookshelf and fell back on Hope. Her breathing was soft and regular. A siren sounded again, but her breathing remained unchanged. I turned off the light, crept into the hallway, and gently shut her door and pressed my ear against the thin wood panels.

The living room din was loud and mumbled into white noise. I heard John and Erin’s laugher above everyone else’s on the balcony. I held my breath and leaned into the door, but I couldn’t hear Hope’s breathing. I stood there a few more moments, breathing softly and appreciating the freedom to do it. That’s what meditation is to me: calmness in a storm and choice of focus, but with an awareness of what’s happening around you. A faint lion’s roar rippled across Balboa, through the forest of withering Redwoods, and into our building; it was inaudible in the hallway room, but I could hear it reverberating in the hollow wooden door. In the jungle, the long wavelengths of a lion’s deep roar travel across plains and through forests and mark their territory. Every night it was quiet and I heard the subtle roar, I wondered if the lion knew it was in a zoo.

I realized I was slouching. I stood upright and pulled my shoulders back and took another deep breath. I exhaled slowly, and glanced at the illuminated hands on my almost archaic scuba watch, older than my new young neighbors from Metairie. I could see the hands without my glasses, and it was around 11:30, plus or minus a bit of blur. I walked back outside and joined my friends on the balcony.

The last of guests left around 1am. It was a good party, and I’m glad I hosted it. Mr. Charles was motionless in his sleeping bag and Mary was fretting with hers, but she moved more slowly and less jittery than before, as if battling her demons had done her in for the night. I didn’t see the transients. They were probably behind the building and out of sight from the cars that drove along 6th avenue late at night. I stretched and sighed, and gently collected my things for a Lyft ride to the airport without waking anyone up.

I sat back on the balcony and kicked up my feet and rubbed my neck. The lion roared from its cage again, and an owl that lived in the Magnolia tree swooped silently past the balcony. I fished a Sierra Nevada out of the cooler. I opened it with the bottle opener on my knife, poured it into a glass, and reclined in the wrought iron chair with my big feet draped over the rail. I sighed, sipped the beer, and leaned in to early morning silence.

Go to The Table of Contents

1. Chief Justice Earl Warren concludes his three page missive about Big Daddy with these three sentences on how trusting his word threatened the American justice system:
   
   ‘This is a federal criminal case, and this Court has supervisory jurisdiction over the proceedings of the federal courts. If it has any duty to perform in this regard, it is to see that the waters of justice are not polluted. Pollution having taken place here, the condition should be remedied at the earliest opportunity.‘”
   
   When I shared that quote with John, he burst into laugher and blurted out: “I wonder what Warren would say about the turd still floating in the swimming pool of justice!” That turd is my grandfather’s word in Hoffa vs. The United States, which Warren was the only one of nine judges to dissent against, leading Hoffa and others to say that Bobby influenced event the so-called blind supreme court judges. I laughed, but he got me thinking about how to clean the pool for kids like Hope, to fish out the turd so they don’t have to swim polluted water when they’re older. That’s what I wanted to discuss with my buddies in the state department, but those conversations never made their way into our jokes on the balcony. ↩︎