Customs and my big feet, 01 March 2019

“Partin was a big tough-looking man with an extensive criminal record as a youth. Hoffa misjudged the man and thought that because he was big and tough and had a criminal record and was out on bail and was from Louisiana, the home states of Carlos Marcello, the man must have been a guy who paints houses.”

Frank “The Irishman” Sheeran in “I Heard You Paint Houses,” 2004

On 01 March 2019, I was wriggling in my seat, trying to find the least uncomfortable position an Airbus parked on the Houston runway. I began the day grumpy. After an irresponsibly late night, I woke before sunlight illuminated my eastern facing balcony, but still later than I had planned. I took a Lyft two miles to the San Diego airport, where a kid in a TSA costume confiscated the Leatherman on my belt and the Victorionox from my keychain that I had forgotten to remove. I smiled thanks to that glitch in my cheeks as he lectured me about TSA rules and airplane safety, and I resisted the urge to tell him that I’ve parachuted from more planes than he had boarded. He was probably in diapers when the Twin Towers fell, and by then I had been carrying knives on airplanes longer than he was old. In fairness, the way I felt with every extra minute our layover was delayed, it’s probably a good thing that he took my knives. I shifted again, trying to get my hips away from a right angle by leaning into the open seat beside me and resting my knees against the window. A pen was in my right hand, and half-read copy of “I Heard You Paint Houses” was in my left.

The intercom cracked on, and a voice that sounded like it was accepting my order from a drive-through speaker mumbled an apology, and that – mumble mumble mumble – those passengers were boarding now. I glanced up and craned my neck to see three people hurrying on board without carryon bags. There were only three seats available, and I sighed and began to reconfigure my body back into a more uncomfortable position. A young man, 30 to 35 years old, navigated down the isle. He glanced between seat numbers and the ticket in his hand, as if he either didn’t recognize the pattern of seats or expected the number on his ticket to magically change. He stopped beside the empty seat next to me (it was the only one left that far back in the plane) and looked back and forth between his ticket and the seat number twice before plopping down and sighing loudly so that would know what a good person he was for being so cheerful despite the – mumble mumble – ordeal he had experienced. I focused on reading and scribbling notes in the margin; I knew I was grumpy, and that the nicest thing I could do for someone was to practice my Miranda rights, the right to remain silent, something I wished people who thumped the bill of rights like southern evangelicals thump their bibles would practice more often. Focusing on my book helped me not say things like that.

“What you reading?” he asked cheerfully.

I straightened my head, and spun the pen around my thumb like a magician doing a flourish, like I had learned by watching Iceman in 1985’s Top Gun. I set the pen in the open paperback and closed the book with the front cover facing up. I slowly removed my glasses and rotated to look at him. I was smiling that automatic smile; it’s useful, and probably the greatest gift my grandfather gave me.

“Say again,” I said.

“What are you reading?” He asked even more cheerfully.

I twisted my left wrist to show the book cover more clearly. He glanced down for a brief moment.

“What’s it about?”

I had seen him reading his ticket and the seat numbers without glasses, so I assumed he could see without aid. I rotated my hand to show the back cover. He glanced down for another moment, then looked up at my baseball cap and back down to my eyes. The book hadn’t registered.

“Did you go to LSU?” the young man asked.

You couldn’t get anything past this guy. I was wearing a sun and salt-water faded licensed LSU baseball cap that was 100% wool. It was so faded that the purple was more like a soft brown, and what used to be gold L S U letters was more like the sunburnt yellow of a southwestern adobe lime-stained paint. Dana called it “sunset gold.” I didn’t plan on talking, so I hadn’t rotated it backwards. I wore it to protect my newly discovered bald spot from overhead airplane air conditioners that target my scalp like campfire smoke finds my eyes no mater which way the wind blows. I had hoped the faded color would reduce the ostensible peacocking of people who flaunt their tribe.

I said, “I don’t know why you ask.”

He smiled broadly at his observation skills and nodded towards my head. “Because you’re wearing an LSU baseball cap.”

I loved that cap. I had found it floating off the cliffs of Point Loma Nazarene University the April before, a few days after I returned from a three month sabbatical to Nepal and India. It was an epic surf day, glassy water and evenly spaced waves and no clouds on a sunny San Diego Tuesday. To this day, it’s the best surf session I ever had. I stayed out longer than I should, catching wave after wave and paddling back out with arm strength from three months of yoga and climbing in the Himalayas, and I could have gone on forever had my nose and yet-to-be-noticed bald spot weren’t sizzling. I could see my nose, a blurred but bright red boiled crawfish just below my vision, and I knew my sunscreen had long since vanished; it was only good for 80 minutes, according to the package, and my watch told me I had already been out for two hours. I was beyond the break, resting sitting upright on my 7’6” fun board and trying to override my desire to stay because I knew it would hurt more tomorrow if I did. I wished I had remembered to bring my surfing hat, a thin orange cap with a chin strap that floated when it inevitably slid off after a tumble; but I hadn’t known about my bald spot then, and I didn’t know how epic the session would be. I sighed, a pleasant sigh of capitulating to wisdom and happy about that, and was about to lie down and paddle towards the break when my peripheral vision caught a what looked like a dark brown hat bobbing in the waves about 25 yards out. I spun around, lied down, and paddled out. When I picked it out of the water and saw what it was, I laughed out loud. It was a size 7-1/4, a tad tight for my head, which was even more auspicious because it would cling to me when I inevitably got tumbled (I’m not a very good surfer, I just love the activity and seek out calm days that other surfers find unchallenging). I wasn’t as surprised by finding an LSU hat off the coast of San Diego as you’d imagine; we have an active LSU alumni association and host the largest crawfish boil west of The Mississippi every April, hosting up to 36,000 people in Qualcomm Stadium and requiring a few 18 wheelers driven by Teamsters to truck thousands of pounds of mudbugs 3,000 miles from southern Louisiana to Southern California. The boil is followed by a Louisiana-sponsored Gator by The Bay festival downtown, where a more 18 wheelers driven by more Teamsters bring end-of-season mudbugs, gator on a stick, shrimp for Po’Boys on stale bread, and other dregs from the Louisiana festival season to major cities who don’t know they’re eating the dregs; but with the beer that flows and festive Zydeco music playing, even I don’t mind, and I go almost every year. Any one of the truckers, alumni, or tourists could have dropped their LSU cap overboard on a fishing charter to Point Loma’s underwater kelp forests, or lost it playing in the water along our 78 miles of coastline. When I got home and the hat dried out, it was somewhat purple and somewhat gold. A quick snip with my Victorionox scissors made it fit me perfectly. A few days later, my peeling scalp let me know that I should start wearing a hat more often, and I had worn it practically every day since.

“I grew up in Baton Rouge,” I told him.

“Do you have family in Houston?” He asked.

Bobby Kenedy bought Mamma Jean and her five children a four bedroom house in a Houston suburb to get her away from the threats to Partins four hours away in Baton Rouge. That house was paid for in 1964, and when she passed away in 1996 several of my relatives faired well on the sale. Aunt Cynthia and Aunt Theresa and about a dozen of my cousins and their kids were, and are still, there, listed in the phone book under their married names. I didn’t see how to avoid his question, so I summed the kid in front of me before answering.

He was a white guy around 35 years old, with chubby cheeks and a polo shirt that may have once fit him but was now too tight. It emphasized his arms, which looked like he had once done a sport in college but was too busy with work to exercise regularly now. He had slight raccoon eyes, and I assumed he wore designer sunglasses to golf with coworkers on weekends. It made sense that he’d ask about family in Houston, because their economy is more conducive to college degrees than Louisiana’s agriculture, oil, and tourism industries; practically all of my engineering friends from LSU had moved to Houston or Atlanta. And since Katrina, about another 200,000 Louisiana folks had migrated there. He probably played golf with people who wore LSU caps and liked to talk about it. He was clean shaven and smell was unremarkable, with either no aftershave or an unobtrusive one, and I couldn’t smell cigarette smoke so I assumed he didn’t smoke and didn’t spend his days with people who did. He was educated, or at least smart enough to not smoke and wealthy enough to wear brand name clothes and fly away to for a weekend in Fort Lauderdale, our plane’s destination (I assumed he wasn’t transferring overseas or joining me in Cuba), but he didn’t seem to recognize the book I was reading.

My mind replayed what I had just read Frank “The Irishman” Sheenan saying in 2014, when he was a brusque 80-something year old man with nothing to loose. In my mind’s ear, his voice had a gruff, no-bullshit working class northern accent, forged into a sharp rasp that grated your ears by two years of combat as an infantryman in WWII, twenty years as a hitman for Philidelphia and New Jersey families, a decade of Teamster leadership in Local #35, and 13 years in prison for what he and my grandfather and a slew of other old-school Teamsters did under Hoffa, racketeering. He bluntly pointed out the the United States taught him to kill and rewarded him for being good at it, and the irony of never being convicted of murder and spending 13 years for a word few even understand because of Kennedy’s crack-down on Hoffa and organized crime sharpened his rasp and gave a rare and outdated type of wisdom to his speech. He said, “Kids nowadays don’t know who Hoffa was. I mean, they may know the name, but they don’t know how much power he had.” He had also said he’d be a Hoffa man until he died, then says he killed the man that weirded so much power, showing just how fearless and calculating he must have been. I wouldn’t call the young man sitting next to me a kid, but I could see how Frank would. He’d probably call me a kid.

I took a deep breath slowly without changing my smile, and exhaled just as slowly. I couldn’t imagine an end to the questions. He had probably read – or his father had read or pop culture simply influenced him – the 80 year old book that persisted in America like the herpes virus, “How To Win Friends and Influence People”; it erroneously said that all people like talking about themselves and their interests, and continues to influence how we talk. I told him I was reading and didn’t want to chat. He shrugged, kept smiling, and pulled out his iPhone and began scrolling Facebook. I returned to scrubbing notes. We took off and he paid the uncharge for WiFi access, and adjusted the overhead air conditioner. The cold air hit my cap and rolled off the brim without chilling my bald spot or drying out my eyes.

I loved that hat.

The plane passed over the Gulf of Mexico, but I was on the right hand side and couldn’t see Louisiana. All I could see through the clouds were a few stationary offshore oil rigs and tankers moving around them like ants circling dead bugs. I kept reading and finished just as we crossed the Florida panhandle. I set the book on my open tray table and rested my glasses atop the book. I fidgeted with the pen in my hand, absent mindedly making the cap vanish and reappear, and concentrated on relaxing so that what I read and noted could digest and mix with thirty years of reading different versions of the same thing. I knew I was like most people, biased and often ignorant of my biases, and that you can’t add to a full cup, so I was trying to let my mind settle before thinking too much about what I read. It’s odd growing up knowing more about Hoffa and Kennedy’s demise than the FBI; you learn to keep your thoughts private, otherwise you invite debate or sound like a conspiracy theorist. Even with The Irishman’s so-called definitive answers, the FBI still assigned rookies to solving Hoffa’s disappearance. They, like the kid who took my Leatherman tool, probably think a lot of their job. One thing kept wiggling it’s way into my thoughts, though, no matter how much I tried to ignore it. In the afternoons of the re-released paperback, timed to match the marketing of Martin Scorcese’s impending $257 Million opus, Frank mentioned seeing fellow hitmen loading duffle bags of Italian 6.5mm carbines like the one Lee Harvey Oswald owned. Despite Chief Justice Earl Warren’s mistaken Warren Report, few people today doubt that more than one rifle was used. I hand’t considered that multiple shooters trying to frame one person would require identical rifles, so maybe I didn’t know as much as I imagined. That realization was worth reading to the end of The Irishman.

Our plane landed in Fort Lauderdale and the young man put away his phone and said in the cheerful voice of someone on a golf vacation without a lot on their mind, “Have a great vacation!”

I told him “You, too,” and gathered my small personal item backpack with the book in it. I reached into the overhead bin and yanked out my carryon backpack with scuba fins strapped to the outside, and fished deep inside to reach my rolled up yoga mat that always seems to sneak past attendants counting carryon items.

About a half hour later, I boarded the a small Jet Blue plane bound for Havana. Only a few caucasians were aboard, and I kept my head down and navigated my bags and yoga mat through the narrow isle. I put the mat and carryon backpack with my scuba fins strapped outside in the overhead bin, pushing hard to force the bag in, and squeezed myself into the window seat. I

An elderly Cuban man in a botero plopped down next to me, and spoke that old-school greeting that’s blissfully uninvasive: “Buenas Tardes.” I nodded and replied in kind. The stewardesses double-checked our visas and tickets, which Jet Blue emphasized included 30 days of travel health insurance, including $150,000 to be evacuated back home, which was a requirement of anyone visiting Cuba’s state-funded healthcare system. A stewardess delivered the safety briefing in Spanish and then in English, and we took off. Both the elderly man and I adjusted the overhead air conditioners away from our heads, and both of us used our hands to ensure we weren’t sending it to each other’s space, though he didn’t seem to notice the shared act.

I took a pen in my hand and cracked open the Lonely Planet guide book an began to plan. I circled a few casa particulares, private homes not unlike AirBnB’s earllier model, but unable to us the American web site to help their business for reasons I don’t understand. I’ve been slightly claustophobic since 1983 – hence being extra grumpy on long flights, trapped inside a flying aluminum can with no leg room, much less space for my big feet – so I circled descriptions that included phrases like “bright” and “airy,” and that were within walking distance of places I wanted to peruse. I circled a used book shop and cafe, humorously called “Cuba Libro” and located in a non-touristy neighborhood, and Hemmingway’s house to help me visualize Havana’s layout. Less than an hour later, we were landing so I returned the book to my personal item bag, and pressed my nose against the window to catch my first glimpses of Havana.

My mind was blank, mostly from a throbbing headache and sense of urgency to jump out of the tiny cramped plane, but it began to fill with gleeful anticipation of the next month with nowhere to be an nothing to do, no phone or computer – not even a dive computer. I was going analog, and it felt liberating. The plane jostled when it hit the runway, and the diminutive roar of its engines wound down. We came to a stop, and I knew nothing was left that could stop the trip. I smiled a smile that had been 30 years in the making.

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