Havana 2

“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.”¹

Frank “The Irishman” Sheeran in “I Heard You Paint Houses,” 2014

I stepped onto the tarmac and took a deep breath, inadvertently inhaling a lung full of JP-4 jetfuel. I choked and resisted an urge to vomit, exhaled and leaned over and breathed slowly until the feeling passed. I stood up straight and smiled.

Any day you land with the plane is a good day. After Big Daddy’s funeral in 1990, I graduated Belaire High School and left for the army and became a paratrooper in the 82nd Airborne just in time for the first Gulf war. The right side of my body was thrashed from many rough PLF’s, parachute landing falls, the bread and butter of a paratrooper. When we jump out it’s expected that people are shooting at us, so a rapid decent with hard landings is preferred to lingering in air. We hit the ground with around 80 pounds of gear and the same speed as if you jumped off a two-story building. Crashing into the ground or through trees that somewhat soften the blow can be unpleasant, so many of us preferred landing with the plane. Airborne school is mostly conditioning your mind and body to habitually land with a PLF, crumpling from foot to hip to shoulder and absorbing the impact exactly like cars are designed with crumple zones to protect passengers at the expense of replaceable parts. My smile as I stood on the ground was so big you could have seen it from 30,000 feet.

My smile suddenly vanished faster than Jimmy Hoffa, and I whipped my head around and stared up the airplane stairs.

“Fuck!” I exclaimed so loudly that an elderly Cuban couple walking past heard me over the engine’s roar. I smiled apologetically, and took another breath, though less deeply this time. I had forgotten my yoga mat on the plane. People were piling out and Cuban officials were directing us towards customs, and I new it was too late to go back on board. I muttered “Fuck” again, took another breath, and forced a subtle smile as I stared up at people struggling to get all of their baggage out of the narrow airplane door, and pondered how I had forgotten the mat.

I wasn’t concerned about the mat itself. I could stretch without it, get another one, or use a towel. I was concerned about why I forgot it after carrying it from plane to plane all day, looking forward to using it to relieve the aches and pains my body inevitably feels after sitting too long. I was worried that the mat was a tangible sign of early-stage dementia.

Ten months before, just after I returned from my 2018 sabbatical, Doc, my primary care physician at the Veterans Administration Hospital, began testing my memory to establish a baseline and monitor possible degeneration. He was a cheerful and physically unremarkable person for someone born in southern India, and he believed that the mind sensed thoughts and could become confused or frustrated when gaps in memory appeared, as if the mind were a spectator watching an old VHS movie with parts that had become blurry. In other words, he believed that the mind wasn’t thoughts or memories, it was what sensed thoughts and memories. Our memories were a collection of neural links that, like an aging VHS tape, could degrade over time or after undergoing trauma. To monitor degeneration, an outside observer needed to peer into your current memory using standardized tests that could be repeated in the future.

Doc had been my primary care physician for eleven years, and he thought I was a more cheerful person than I am. He hadn’t noticed my mood changes, and there was no test for it, but I had seen my smile becoming more and more forced each year. He didn’t notice because we always met in his office, a well lit room with windows overlooking the trees and small stream flowing through Penosquitos Canyon regional park, and in a way I looked forward to seeing him and visiting the area around Sorento Valley every six months to a year. I’d bring my mountain bike and ride the canyon after our visit, and after biking I’d visit a small neighborhood nano-brewery for a West Coast Style IPA, sometimes called a San Diego IPA; one of the most famous San Diego IPA’s had been Sculpin, a flagship beer of Ballast Point, which had just sold to an international alcohol brand for $1.1 Billion. The founder, who had earned his PhD in microbiology from UCSD but preferred brewing to working in San Diego’s renowned biotech industry, became an instant millionaire yet maintained his small home-brew shop and still brewed with local nano-brewers who catered to biotech engineers like me, who got off work and wanted to relax with a beer or two at happy hour before repeating the cycle again the next day.

Doc and I had a transparent doctor-patient relationship that was mostly truthful. His notes included that I consumed marijuana – my urine tests showed it, and I expounded on the homegrown stains I was developing – and he added to his notes that I requested the VA and all subsequent physicians if Doc ever departed to never, under any circumstances, no matter what I said in the future, ever prescribe opiods to me again. The irony of canibis being federally illegal in the pot-friendly state of California, yet opiods being handed out like candy on Halloween, was something I wanted cited on my record, if only as a meek social cometary. Though I always answered Doc honestly, I wasn’t always truthful. I answered the mandatory VA question about how many beers I drank a day honestly, but without the full disclosure of my marijuana use. I said two, sometimes three beers, which was true; but I knew that Doc’s questionnaire was based on archaic assumptions dating back to Vietnam vets returning, drinking too many ubiquitous canned beers. The questionnaire asked how many beers, not which type. Two 12 ounce cans of 4.5% beer was under the radar, but two to three 16 ounce pints of 7.2% or greater IPA’s was equivalent to six to seven beers on the outdated questionnaire. Other than that nuance that slipped by Doc because he didn’t drink alcohol at all, we had an open and transparent relationship.

The January before my 2018 springtime sabbatical, I told Doc that was on my way to northern India for the first international conference on philosophy of the mind and modern science, hosted by His Holliness The Dali Lama at the Tibetan University’s 50th anniversary after their exile into India. The Dali Lama had just been in San Diego and Doc had gone to see him at the University of San Diego’s new Kroc center for peace studies, a stunning piece of domed architecture overlooking Mission Bay and paid for with a $51 Million grant by the widow of Ray Kroc, the founder of McDonalds and former owner of the San Diego Padres. It was a prestigious event. I had missed him speaking in 2017 because I was busy with some of my students, who were helping me build Donald’s Garage in the newly renamed Shiley-Marcos School of Engineering after the widow of Donald Shiley, Ms. Marcos, donated $21 Million for a hands-on, glass-enclosed innovation space named for her late husband’s home workshop; he was a mechanical engineer who made his fortune inventing the Shiley-Bjork heart valve in his garage, which was scooped up by Pzier in the 1980’s for around $800 Million. If only subconsciously, USD was seeing that together, innovation and peace can unite the world. USD is one of 18 private Catholic universities in America, but the only one not under the dioscese, and we’re lucky to have diverse religions discussed with a simple goal of service to the poor, which is a lofty ideal coming from an institution that costs $56,000 a year to attend. I was so focused on my part in that mission that I missed The Dali Lama speaking in the Kroc center. But, I scored an invitation to a more intimate event in India that coincided with a Buddhist pilgrimage to historical sites linked to Siddhartha Gautama and his first teachings in Deer Park, which was as close to the new Tibetan University as Mission Bay was to USD. Their goal is unequivocally peace of mind for all sentient beings, and The Dali Lama, a famous tinkerer who said he may have become an engineer had he not been a simple monk, knew that science could be a key that helped us unlock the mind.

I was looking forward to the trip, and spoke to Doc about it because he was born near that region in what he joked was a small Indian village of 900,000 people. Because he knew the area so well, he pumped me full of vaccines and accepted my request for a gammu globulin shot, and three weeks later I was on an airplane headed to Nepal to slowly work my way to the conference.

I spent almost 30 hours on planes getting from San Diego to Khatmandu. I planned ahead by allocating two weeks to unwind, do yoga, and acclimate to altitude. To pass time and learn a bit of Nepali, I took yoga classes and performed magic at middle schools; it wasn’t just magic, I linked the routines to math and science, and planned to use their burgeoning internet access to show them how to find solutions to what seemed impossible when I performed, and to verify anything I said before believing me. Instead of my usual half dollars, I wanted to use old local coins – more for my enjoyment than for a history lesson for the kids – so I strolled through markets looking for some. Khatmandhu was still recovering from an earthquake the year before, and a ten year civil war before that, so tourism was at a long-time low. Poverty and failing infrastructure was everywhere, and I attracted attention and calls in the crowded and chaotic street markets. I briskly walked past them andused my Lonely Planet guide to find a more quiet spot to shop. Near a fallen temple and adjacent to the middle school I would eventually perform for, I stooped over a wrinkled elderly vendor sitting cross-legged among the rubble. He was smiling, but seemed tired and hungry, and the area around him smelled of old food scraps and accumulated rubbish unable to be picked up by the struggling government. I was happy to share a few dollars in exchange for coins. He told me a price, but my Nepali wasn’t good and I wasn’t used to their currency yet, so I paused to convert rupees to dollars using the outdated exchange rate in my guide book that would be close enough. I rounded everything to simple numbers to make mental math easier, and at some point I needed to multiply six times seven. I stood there for almost two minutes – the length of a round of wrestling – struggling to see the answer and wondering why I couldn’t.

I could see six times six, maybe because 36 sounds right, and six times eight for the same reason. But I couldn’t see 42. It was almost exactly like staring at the blurry spot in a worn VHS, not as visual, but with the same mental focus of trying to squint through the blur and make out a shape. I saw a clear memory of me in the second grade writing and rewriting my multiplication tables to learn them through wrote memorization; I was wearing a bluejean jacket with an extra #2 pencil in the inner pocket that stabbed me when writing my numbers, leaving a small dark grey tattoo under my right nipple that I still have today; I was seated in the third row from the chalkboard, slightly stage-left, able to see the poster of multiplication tables on the wall even though I didn’t wear glasses back then. Even in that memory, 42 was blurred.

The vendor mistook my stare as hesitation at the price, and impatiently lowered his request. He probably needed money for food, and was less interested in haggling than making a sale to probably the only person who would walk by looking for old Nepali coins. I quickly did the new math and paid him and walked away with the fake antique coins. I added six to 36 and realized it was 42, then I saw 42 filling in the blurry spots and forming patches rather than the blurry spots opening up. I was scared for the fourth time in my life. Fear was quickly replaced by worry, and worry subsided to concern, and by the time I returned to San Diego it was a memory of being concerned. Though the poignancy was lost, it was remarkable to be scared, and I ruminated on the memory of that moment in the market. I was surprised at how I felt embarrassed to be scared as a 45 year old person, especially because of a background that should have made me immune to fear. But I didn’t want to hide it from Doc. I may have been under-exaggerating the amount of alcohol I drank, but otherwise our relationship was based on trust and transparency, and I wanted my memory documented in my medical records so that future physicians wouldn’t have to rely on me telling stories to see my history.

I brought the coins to my appointment, but before I could use them Doc reacted to the almost twenty pounds I had lost. The Anapurna trail is a remote ardrous multi-week trek through the Himalaya Mountains that made me lean, and the parasites from the poor sewage infrastructure and lack of clean water in India were still stealing calories from every meal. I joked that my worms ate better than people on the streets of Varanase, the holy city on the banks of the Ganges. We chatted about intestinal parasites for a while, and he scheduled me for follow-up with a specialist in City Heights, a cramped neighborhood of around 90,000 refugees and immigrants that had more third-world medical needs than a typical San Diego patients. When his concern for my physical appearance dissipated, I did a quick coin trick to make the story of my arrival in Nepal more real. It was simple coins from hand-to-hand that hopefully emphasized the specificity of that day, though in truth what I had done was more involved and took longer to set up, David Roth’s “hanging coins” from his 1985 book, Expert Coin Magic, published by Kaufman and Greenberg. Doc’s never been impressed by magic, so I wanted to do something faster than hanging coins to recreate the scene. And I knew that he knew me well enough to know that when I discuss anything serious, I camouflage my concern by making jokes and animating my body.

We focused on my being stumped by six times seven, and the number 42. I admitted the math behind my alcohol consumption, just to be fully transparent. He updated his notes, then we talked about a book we had spoken about a few times over the years, The Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. He knew that 42 was the answer to Life the Universe and Everything. and, like me, he was enthralled that Elon Musk had just plastered his red Tesla convertible with Hitchiker’s bumper stickers and launched it into space atop a Space-X rocket. Doc didn’t know that Pat Tillaman’s Arizona Cardinals football jersey had been 42, though he, like most people back then, knew that Pat had quit his multi-million dollar NFL gig to join the army Rangers as an E2 private earning under a grand a month, and over a couple of years earn his E4 specialist, which was his rank was then killed by fratricide in Afghanistan. Senior officers in the army intentionally hid that embarrassment because of Pat’s celebrity status, and when the truth came out the scandal rocked all sides of the political spectrum, even with the softened phrase “friendly fire” downplaying how throughout our history, we kill more of ourselves than the opponent does. (Desert Storm had the distinction of being the first American war to not loose more of us to us than to them, unless you count the long history of deaths and suicides that follow any armed conflict.) And though Doc knew I had invented several medical devices, and that a few were bone healing implants still carried by the VA, he didn’t know that the San Diego company where I managed R&D and marketing had been acquired by Integra Life Sciences for $42 Million in 2005. I didn’t see much of that, and the official payout was reduced to around $26 Million when sales milestones weren’t met, but the original acquisition price stood out in 2005 and was part of my concern in 2018. After our chat, which went over our allotted appointment time and caused a backlog of cases that day, he agreed that for me to not see the answer to six times seven was, indeed, remarkable.

He updated his notes much more concisely than I had communicated, then leaned forward and in an uncharacteristically tense tone said my lapses could be progression of what the VA called Desert Storm Syndrome, a collection of symptoms we still don’t understand but is linked to the Khamisiyah serin nerve agent explosion on 03 March 1991. After almost thirty years of studies comparing symptoms in soldiers with the general population, including several double-blinded randomized clinical studies, the VA had concluded that around 60,000 soldiers were affected by what they still call Desert Storm Syndrome, even as fewer and fewer people alive remember what Desert Storm was; that’s not surprising given that Desert Storm Syndrome was overseen by the Office of Agent Orange, a Vietnam era toxin that plagues soldiers to this day; I don’t know how many studies it took to start treating those soldiers, but I know that the frail cancer-ridden survivors who sat in line with me wished the VA had begun treating them sooner. I probably learned from them, which may be why I paid so much attention to what Doc told me and why I continued to dig into the research myself.

There were three criteria shown to correlate with the 60,000 people exhibiting symptoms attributed to Desert Storm syndrome: having a naturally occurring protein that is detected in about 40% of the population, having taken Pyridostigmine Bromide – the experimental anti-serin nerve agent pills – during Desert Shield, and being within 100 miles of the Khamiyah Airport explosion that released serin. I hand’t been tested for the protein, but my medical records show me being given Pyridostigmine Bromide, and my platoon, AT4 of Delta Company, 1st Battallion of 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment. AT stands for the Anti-Tank platoons, and we were the 4th platoon out of 8, each having around 20 soldiers. We led the capture of Khamisiyah airport, and all of Delta Company circled it as security when the US dropped two 15,000 pound bombs on it without knowing it was one of Saddam’s chemical weapon stockpiles. The shock wave shook our HUMVEE and covered AT4 with dust, and the mushroom cloud blocked our view of the sky. I was confident that I met the 100-mile radius criteria, and my VA records verify that; in the decades since, I had been a part of three congressional studies into the long-term effects of Khamisiya, yet always as a control group because I had never filed for VA benefits. I just liked using the VA because they kept detailed records of my body and blood tests dating back to 1990, which is an invaluable asset usually overlooked when people pontificate about national healthcare.

Doc was right to be concerned. He began scheduling regular memory assessments beyond my regular annual exam. And, per VA requirements, he began checking in on my mental health, especially after updating my records to show how much alcohol I actually consumed before returning from India.

Several academic studies had just come out that veterans have 4 times the suicide rate of civilians, and those studies were spearheaded in San Diego, which has several renowned universities, like USD and the often confused UCSD, where I was an advisor for their entrepreneurship program, and the nearby SDSU, where I attended their basketball games with friends who were alumni and reminded me of my friends at LSU more than alumni from so-called elite universities. The academic researchers often focus on veteran health because of it’s relevance to San Diego’s economy and culture, and because the VA funds them to. San Diego employs around 250,000 people to support thousands of soldiers at a vast array of bases, including the Navy’s Top Gun school, submarine base, ship building facilities; a few Air Force bases, and the mega Marine base of Camp Pendelton. Not too long before Doc was alarmed about me, a San Diego military base made national headlines when President Obama authorized SEAL Team 6 to kill Osama Bin Ladin, the mastermind behind the 9/11 attack, and sneak his body out of Pakistan for burial at sea. For decades before that, San Diego has been a major out-processing center for the military that was concerned about the growing population of homeless veterans becoming statistics for suicide. Even local corporations donate, because they make billions manufacturing the new drones that had quickly become ubiquitous over the skies in Afghanistan and Iraq. Because of all of that. and because of his personality and Hinduism’s culture of during your duty diligently, Doc was on the forefront of understanding how mind, memory, trauma, and healthcare overlap.

Neural links break bit by bit, so slowly that most people don’t notice. They grow frustrated at plot jumps and unusual behavior in characters other than themselves. I knew older friends and mentors who entered dementia so slowly that not only did they not notice, neither did anyone else. We assumed that their increasing grumpiness and forgetfulness was just getting older. Coach was one of them, and his 2015 passing was still fresh in my mind.² He was the strongest man I’ve ever known, and if it could happen to him it could happen to anyone. President Reagan succumbed to Alzheimer’s in 2004, and though I didn’t know him personally I assume that he had the best healthcare possible yet still deteriorated and stopped public appearances because of that. Robin Williams hung himself in 2014 after being diagnosed with Parkinson’s, which is similar to Alzheimer’s and leads to confusion, anxiety, and depression; he stopped being funny in his final days, and doubted all of his life’s work. Earnest Hemmingway probably experienced the same thing when he put a 10 gage double-barrel shotgun barrel in his mouth in 1961, shortly after being asked to scribble a few words in tribute of President Kennedy, but so trapped by depression, paranoia, and rumination about his deteriorating memory and eyesight that even a Nobel laurate in literature couldn’t put pen to paper in his final days. I probably performed a coin trick for Doc just to ensure I wasn’t loosing a part of me I had had since childhood, a bellwether for my body to follow when my mind seemed confused.

I had VA medical records and psychological exams for security clearances dating back to 1990. I joined the army’s delayed entry program in 1989, at age 16, but my medical records began in basic training a year later, when I was 17, so I had almost 30 years of uninterrupted medical records with them. But the army never tested my memory, so I had no baseline from which to measure and therefore Doc started anew in 2018. In his notes, he had patterns of my irritation and drinking alcohol with unhealthy frequency that added to his concern. I passed all preliminary memory exams – they were simple tests designed for gross losses and couldn’t compare to what I had been like – but I remained mindful of the possibility of gradual and almost imperceivable memory degradation. And, though Doc didn’t see it, I knew that had been growing more and more grumpy over the years, seeing my mind want to be abrupt yet overriding it with what I knew was socially acceptable, hiding behind jokes and magic tricks to avoid answering based on how I felt; though even today, after all that has happened since this story began, I still attribute any grumpiness to aches and pains of a body that has had a disproportionate number of rough miles on it compared to most people who sit still on long airplane flights and engage in small talk, or sit behind desks all day then rush to happy hour.

In Havana, I stood still on the tarmac with an aching body and a lot on my mind, whatever that is – even after the conference in India and listening to The Dali Lama for a few days and Doc all year I wasn’t sure. My xrays and MRI’s show a wood-rasp of bone spurs along most of my spinal chord, which is why sitting for too long sends spikes of pain radiating to my head, right arm, and right leg; there’s not a written test that tells someone what that feels like, but it’s not unlike having a tooth pulled without anasthesia and touching your tongue to both terminals of a 9 volt battery all day, every day. It’s worse after a long flights, and dealing with those feelings distracts my thoughts and actions. And though not diagnosed by the VA, I’ve been slightly claustrophobic since 1983. I realized that in the 82nd, after being crammed into the bellies of C141’s and a few older and more cramped C130’s with 64 ‘troopers on a one-way trip and a hundred pounds of gear strapped to our bodies, layered across each others laps for 18 hours. I never had clear thoughts on those flights, and as soon as I hit the ground I saw how badly my mind resisted being trapped in small spaces. My body was much stronger back then, but my agitated mind wanted to jump out so badly that I would have forgotten anything not dummy-corded to me. I didn’t think clearly until I was on the ground, standing outside, happy to be free no matter how I got there. I felt the same when we landed instead of jumping. Some things don’t change, and I was already feeling better after exiting the plane in Havana. I had both feet on the ground, so it was a good day. Sometimes, I being detached memories of being cramped inside an airplane is useful for happiness, which is something even the Dali Lama would agree upon. It’s no wonder some people consider memory loss as a side-effect of using canibis to be a good thing.

Forgetting the mat probably wasn’t dementia, I told myself. It had just been a long day, and my mat wasn’t strapped to my backpack like my fins were. I smiled at remembering myself following guidelines for a mass attack, tying every loose object to my body with 550 parachute chord. We didn’t use overhead bins, and that’s where my mat sat on the plane as I stood on the tarmac.

I kept my smile and snapped my head back and forth to loosen neck muscles, then shifted my gaze to follow the official’s finger. I tightened my hip belt and slowly walked towards customs, willing my stiff hips to move as smoothly as possible.

I was still feeling agitation, so I paused on the tarmac before entering the building to relax. I took a deep breath that was blissfully free of JP-4 and full of moist, coastal air that soaked into lungs dried out by a long day of airplane air conditioners. It was March, so Havana was a pleasant 70-something degrees, only slightly warmer than the dry coastal air of San Diego but much more pleasant to my scratchy lungs. Of all the Desert Storm syndromes that could be anything else, I distinctly recall my asthma and sinusitus beginning just after the Khamisiyah explosion and worsening after surviving Iraqis ignited the Kuwaity oil fields and we inhaled black, greasy air for two months. I was perched behind a .50 cal machine gun atop a Humvee and wheezing for the first time after a firefight, and a medic, whom everyone called Doc, cauterized my nostrils so I could keep going without bleeding as much. Since then, the Santa Ana winds of San Diego irritated my asthma, just like the air conditioners on long flights, and I breathed the moist Havana deeply to appreciate the soothing effect I felt inside my body. Pleasure is often just a balanced contrast against discomfort, and I felt good. I smiled a genuine smile, and strolled up to two customs officials sitting at a simple folding table.

They stopped joking with each other to greet me. I took off my backpack, pulled out a money belt from the front of my pants, and handed them my passport and round-trip plane ticket. I smiled broadly to say that all was good, and they smiled back. They looked at my passport and asked my name, and I said “Jason Partin,” pronouncing my last name a bit like Spanish, Par-teen, to help them verify it was me; I had lost 35 pounds since the photo was taken, and ironically I looked younger at 46 than my photo from when I was 41, especially because I was the clean shaven in the photo and was sporting a grey beard in Havana. I looked like a thin and smirking Papa Hemmingway.

The older and presumably senior official checked my travel insurance and return flight more thoroughly than my visa. I was on the first day of a three month sabbatical using a loophole to allow me into Cuba for 30 days without illegally routing through Mexico City or Toronto, an “entrepreneurship visa” piloted by the Obama administration and already being removed by the Trump administration; I was likely the last cohort. My flight back was on March 28th to provide a safety window for delayed flights or anything unexpected, but they didn’t seem to notice. The senior official was more interested in the Force Fins strapped to my backpack. He ran his finger along the thick polypropolene and flicked one of the tips with a curious countenance. With all of the tourists flocking to Cuba’s beautiful Carribbean dive sites, he had never seen fins like mine.

Force Fins are different than most SCUBA fins. They’re thick, short, black, duck-feet-looking fins modeled after a dolphin’s tail, invented by a guy in the 1980’s whose name I can never recall and used by SEALS and Rangers in the 80’s and 90’s for long-distance underwater missions. The patents had long since expired (back then, patents expired 20 years after issue, now they become public domain 17 years after filing). But, the market was so small that no new companies invested in manufacturing processes: Force Fins were still the originals. Conveniently, the stubby shape fits in a carryon bag, and I stuck them there in lieu of the Frisbee I usually carried.

I was prepared to answer any questions about my atypical visa. Had I had my Frisbee, I could toss it around while discussing the Frisbee Pie Company near Yale university and the students who tossed empty pie tins around until someone had the idea to patent the shape as a flying disc. At the time, it was an innovative toy. Patents expired after 20 years back then, and now flying discs are ubiquitous because that anyone can copy the design. Saying Frisbee is like saying Kleenex, Zerox, Band-Aide, Q-Tip, and Super Glue for tissues, photocopies, adhesive bandages, cotton swabs, and whatever other people call Super Glue. I didn’t know if Cuba had similar brands or concepts, but I was ready to show examples of the differences between trademarks and patents and brands if anyone asked. Force Fins patents expired, too, but the niche market and expensive injection molding methods prevent them from becoming as ubiquitous as flying discs. Innovation, patents, trademarks, manufacturing, distribution, and market need could all be delved into, should someone ask. Force Fins are much harder to toss back and forth than a Frisbee, but they can still be made into a fun learning lesson in the right context.

The senior official laughed politely and said something to the other, and he laughed too. My Spanish was rusty and I didn’t understand, but I smiled as if I had. The first put his hand through the open-toed fins and spread his fingers wide. He moved his hand in and out, and laughed and made a joke I didn’t understand, but I surmised that he was either being vulgar or joking about my feet. I was used to both. I’m the runt of my family, only 5’11” in the morning (we all shrink about 1.5-2.5 cm by the end of the day because our spinal discs compress, ironically more from sitting than from standing or walking), but I inherited Partin-sized feet and hands that are disproportionately big for my height. It’s like having natural fins and flippers. I chuckled back and shrugged ambiguously, as if to imply any one of the following: “What’s one to do?” or “I don’t know, I just work here.” or “That’s what she said!” They both laughed at whatever they imagined.

The senior official asked where I would be diving. I said Playa de Giron, which was true. Americans call it the Bay of Pigs. I knew a lot about what to expect there, though I thought it was wise to not tell the officials that.

There are a few sunken ships there that I’d like to explore, I said.

He said it was beautiful there, and the younger official agreed. They rummaged through my carryon bag. I had a scuba mask and snorkel that fit me well and was worth packing even though most rentals were good enough. I had a pair of size 14 leather rock climbing shoes stretched over two seasons in Joshua Tree that fit me well, a compact harness, and a worn but servicable caribbeener and UTC that they ignored. I had 14W Chaco’s that could double as beach shoes or hiking shoes. Long ago, I learned to travel with extra shoes; rental shops rarely have my size, and if I loose one it’s hard to find 14W outside of the United States.

My clothing was minimal, swimming trunks, six pair of underwear and two pairs of socks, two pairs of zip-off convertible pants, four quick-dry and compressible long sleeve shirts; one of the shirt brands was Patagonia, founded by the rock climber who became a billionaire and started California’s first Benefit-Corporation, called a B-Corp, and who recently bought a patch of mountains the size of Rhode Island and donated it as a national park in Patagonia – I use it to discuss socially responsible entrepreneurship. I had an iPhone 8 – already considered old by then – and of course could discuss Steve Jobs, an adopted kid who founded Macintosh computers with a few teammates. I had a bright yellow semi-rigid sunglass case with a custom first aide kit, a handful of Band-Aides and a small tube of antiseptic cream, climbing tape that could double as first aide tape; alcohol wipes that could double as hand sanitizer or to clean sunscreen off a scuba mask; an average sized aspirin bottle with a mix of aspirin and chalky white 600mg ibuprofen pills prescribed by the VA that, as SSRI’s, double as mild antidepressants and are useful on many levels after a long flight; an expensive brand of superglue that used pure cyanoacrylate, because cyanoacrylate was originally intended to be a wound-closure glue, and quality brands can still do that and also make quick repairs on coffee-mug handles at guest houses.

I had my copy of The Irishman and a Lonely Planet guide to Cuba; the British husband and wife founders of Lonely Planet had just sold their business to a mega-publisher for something like $50 Million pounds or Euros or whatever they were using back then, about $70 Million dollars and a big enough number to let people know that two hippies with a stapled guide to traveling across Asia could create something remarkable. I had bought it off Amazon, which was originally just a book selling website “as big as the Amazon,” founded by Jeff Bezos, now the world’s richest person and also an adopted kid.

I had two remaining Cliff Bars and one Lara Bar as snacks for the plane rides. Cliff was the founder’s father’s name, and the family-run business had recently consolidated money to re-buy their company for something like $260 Million instead of giving up ownership so that they could continue doing the work they loved; the iconic image still shows a rock climber, and they support many access organizations that I use. Lara Bar was a simple two-ingredient fruit bar that seems obvious in hindsight; the founder, Lara, spent a year and a half iterating her design while she earned minimum wage at Whole Foods, who was her first distributor. Lara Bars was acquired a year and a half later for around $1.5 Million, and she jumped on the opportunity to retire at a young age.

I carried small black pull-string pouch filled with a handfull of Kennedy half dollars and a few old copper English pennies that were the conveniently the same size as Kennedy halves; two loose decks of Bicycle playing cards in metal clip cases to keep them flat in humid areas; and a Zip-Lock baggie full of flesh colored plastic thump tips stuffed with small red handkerchiefs that surprisingly didn’t gather a second glance from the officials.

My tolietries kit included the usual toothbrush and toothpaste, a German safety razor with a blade that had made it through airport security unnoticed. The pack of replacement blades had been confiscated when they showed up on x-ray, along with a Victorionox keychain and one of my Leatherman multitools that were habitually in my travel bag for driving trips to consulting gigs in California and Arizona. Leatherman was named after Tim Leatherman, the Portland engineering graduate who spent six months traveling across Europe in an old van with a Swiss Army Knife – Victorionox – and a pair of pliers, then spent five years in the early 80’s iterating cardboard mockups and sheetmetal prototypes of the world’s first pair of pliers that folded into a knife and tool set; his first contract had been with Delta Force, the army’s anti-terrorism unit based around the corner from the 82nd in Fort Bragg, and then national outdoor supply chains picked up his product, and after Tim’s patents expired, multitools became ubiquitous. I use them in workshops on innovation, and rarely remember to remove them. I’ve probably had dozens confiscated in the years since 9/11 banned them, but that was an old habit and not the the type of forgetfulness that worried me; though to this day I still feel irritated every time a uniformed TSA agent younger than my first Leatherman lectures me about not bringing knives to the airport.

I had peppermint scented liquid Dr. Broner’s soap in a clear, 3.0 ounce, TSA-friendly plastic tube that made decent shaving cream in a pinch, and a homemade aftershave in a 3.25 ounce glass Tabascoo bottle with the label removed that made it past inspectors; the concoction was a mix of witch hazel, grapefruit and lemongrass oil, and a balance of ethyl alcohol so that, if needed, I could use it to either sooth rashes from tight diving weight belts or clean bacteria off of a scrape from rock climbing. I had square plastic container of dental floss with a few extra hefty sewing needles taped to outside; nylon floss is useful as emergency sewing thread, because it’s durable and water-resistant. I had an inexpensive and unobvious double-sided diamond knife sharpener that I habitually carried on flights to use on typically dull kitchen knives in AirBnB’s. The rest of my baggage included reading glasses, sunglasses, a couple of extra Bic pens, a 3.0 ounce tube of sunscreen, etc., and was unremarkable.

The senior official handed back my passport. I put it away in my money belt among a stack of U.S. bills – my visa wouldn’t allow credit card transactions – and closed my backpack, then straightened my posture and hoisted the pack onto my shoulders and tightened the hip strap. I paused for a moment and smiled. They both smiled back, waved goodbye, and said buen viaje. I said gracias, turned around, and strolled out of the building, still ruminating about my mat, but smiling and strolling through the terminal like a duck moving slowly across a murky pond without anyone noticing that its feet are frantically paddling under the surface; I was still thinking about the mat, and worried that I was still thinking about it, which was creating a vicious cycle.

At least I’m through customs, I thought to myself. I made it into Cuba. Despite that relief, my mind returned to the mat. After some effort, I concluded that I had been cramped up all day and had forgotten the mat because of an agitated mind and nothing else. I steered my thoughts to the adventure awaiting me.

I had envisioned going to Cuba ever since my grandfather’s funeral almost 29 years to the day, when I was a senior in high school and had just read Hemmingway’s Old Man and the Sea, and was told he wrote it from his house in Cuba, where he and Castro used to chat or go fishing and drop hand-grenades overboard to shock German u-boats searching for the mouth of the Missisippi River. Growing up believing that my grandfather was a part of that group probably led me to keeping my Papa Hemmingway beard, even though I planned to shave it before wearing a scuba mask and diving in the Bay of Pigs. A quarter of a century was a long time to look forward to closing that chapter of my family’s stories, and not even a lost yoga mat or lung full of JP-4 could have removed the smile on my face. My feeling on the flight and irritation at losing my Leatherman were forgotten. I breathed moist island air deeply, and let the trip begin.

Go to The Table of Contents

Footnotes:

1. Teamsters make remarkable business associates and grandfathers, especially if you know mafia lingo. To “paint houses” means to paint walls red with splattered blood. When Hoffa first called Frank Sheenan on what could have been a tapped phone line, he said, “I heard you paint houses,” implying Hoffa was looking for assistance and seeking men he could trust. Frank, who would spend time with Hoffa’s family and earn a spot leading Teamster Local #326 (and spend 13 years of a 32 year sentence in priso.n for racketeering on behalf of the Teamsters), spent the next decade saying he’d “be a Hoffa man until the day he died,” but in his 2004 memoir he claims to have accepted a mafia request to paint a Detroit house red with Hoffa’s blood on 30 July 1975.
   
   Frank, like every other Teamster in America, knew of my grandfather, president of Teamsters Local #5 and Hoffa’s trusted confidant, a man so brutal Hoffa asked him to guard his hotel room against squads of FBI agents and mafia strongmen. Big Daddy’s Wikipedia page includes this summary:
   
   “Partin was the business manager of the five local IBT branches in Baton Rouge for 30 years. In 1961, he was charged by the union with embezzlement as union money was stolen from a safe. Two key witnesses in the grand jury died. He was indicted on June 27, 1962, for 26 counts of embezzlement and falsification and released on bail. On August 14, 1962, Partin was sued for his role in a traffic accident injuring two passengers and killing a third. He was also indicted for first-degree manslaughter and leaving the scene of an accident. He also surrendered himself for aggravated kidnapping.
   He was finally convicted of conspiracy to obstruct justice through witness tampering and perjury in March 1979. Partin pled no contest to numerous other corruption charges in the union, including embezzlement, and was released in 1986.
   
   That Wikipedia page underexaggerates the safe. It was a massive steel box that would seemingly take two or three strong men to budge, yet someone removed it from the Local #5 office and knew the combination to open it. The empty safe was found empty at the bottom of a shallow but murky river near the swampy woods of my childhood home, just beneath a nondescript concrete bridge overpass in an area were Big Daddy and my father took me hunting. The safe was for Local #5 records, and before vanishing it also held $450,000 in cash, which was like having around $2 million lying around today. Hoffa tried to use that incident to discredit Big Daddy, too. He wrote:
   
   “When Partin began to attract the attention of federal law-enforcement agencies he had been boss of the Teamsters local in Baton Rouge for several years. Some rebellious members of his local accused him of embezzling union funds. They also charged that he had gone off to Cuba and consulted with a Castro deputy about a gun-smuggling deal.
   
   At about the same time and just before federal auditors arrived on the scene to see if there as anythign to the charges made by union members, a six-hundred-pound safe containing all of the union’s records and books disappeared from the union hall. It was found sometime later in the Amite River – empty.
   
   Then, in November, 1961, Partin was involved in a mysterious shooting. A pistol was discharged. Partin was wounded in the abdomen. Partin insisted to authorities that he had been handling the weapon and that it had gone off accidentally.
   
   Leading the union criticism against Partin were to rank-and-file Teamsetrs, A.G. Klein, Jr., and J.D. Albin. In company wihtthe other Teamsters from the local, the two men tstified before a grand jury in East Baton Rouge that indicted Partin for forging a withdrawl card – a form of resignation card – that, it was alleged, effectively removed one of Partin’s other critics from the union.
   
   Subsequently Albin and Klein were brutally beaten up by a group of six men, allegedly Teamsetrs from Partin’s clique in the local. And soon thereafter Klein was killed when a truck loaded with sand ‘fell on him’ in St. Francisville, Louisiana.”
   
   Hoffa would go on to rant about the safe and dead witnesses for a few pages, and then say that Big Daddy’s charges disappeared and his bail bonds were reduced “like magic.”
   
   As for mentioning Marcello, Frank knew that Hoffa worked with all the mafia family heads, and that New Orlean’s Carlos Marcello was a primary partner, along with Miami’s Cuban exile, Santos Trafacante Junior. Contrary to the hastily assembled 1964 Warren Report that said Oswald acted alone when he shot and killed Kennedy, those three men – Hoffa, Marcello, and Trafficante – are the suspects identified by the classified 1979 congressional JFK Assassination Report as prime suspects in orchestrating the president’s murder. According to fifteen years of reaearch after The Warren Report, they were the three with the “means, motive, and method” to orchestrate Kennedy’s assassination. It was interesting for me to read that Frank phrased his book as if Marcello had Big Daddy in his back pocket instead of considering it could have been the other way around. ↩︎
2. Coach’s family, specifically Craig Ketelsen and Mrs. K, Coach’s wife, graciously gave me permission to publish anything about him. When I was a teenager listening to Big Daddy’s stories, Coach was the yin to his yang, a man so honorable he balanced being a part in the Teamsters.
   
   Dale Glenn Ketelsen, 78, Retired Teacher and Coach, passed away March 22, 2014 at Ollie Steele Burden Manor with his wife by his side. A Memorial service will be held Saturday, March 29 at University United Methodist Church, 3350 Dalrymple Drive. Visitation will begin at 10 am with a service to follow at 12 pm conducted by Rev. Larry Miller. Dale is survived by his wife of 52 years, Pat Ballard Ketelsen, 2 sons: Craig (Emily) Ketelsen of Covington, La; Erik (Bonnie) Ketelsen, Atlanta, Ga and one daughter, Penny (Lee) Kelly, Nashville, TN; 5 grandchildren: Katie, Abby, Brian and Michael Ketelsen and Graham Kelly; a Sister-in-Law, Karen Ketelsen of Osage, Iowa, and numerous neices and nephews. He was preceded in death by his parents, 2 sisters and a brother. Dale was born in Osage, Iowa where he attended High School, lettering in 4 sports. Upon graduation, he attended Iowa State University as a member of the wrestling team where he was a 2 time All American and won 2nd and 3rd in the NCAA finals in Wrestling. He was a finalist in the Olympic Trials for the 1960 Olympics. After graduation, he joined the US Marine Reserves and returned to ISU as an Asst. Wrestling Coach. In 1961, he took a job as Teacher/Coach at Riverside-Brookfield High School in Suburban Chicago, Ill. While there, he also earned a Masters Degree from Northern Illinois University. In 1968, he was hired to start a Wrestling program at LSU in Baton Rouge, La. He was on the Executive Board of the National Wrestling Coaches Association and a founding member of USA Wrestling. He was the wrestling host for the National Sports Festival in 1985, He was instrumental in promoting wrestling in the High Schools in Louisiana. He was head Wrestling Coach at Belaire High School for 20 years and Assistant Wrestling coach at The St. Paul’s School in Covington, La. He was devoted to Faith, Family, Farm and the sport of Wrestling. Among his many honors were induction into the National Wrestling Hall of Fame and being named Master of Wrestling (Man of the Year) for Wrestling USA magazine. He was a long time member and Usher of University United Methodist Church. In lieu of flowers, the family asks that donations be made to Alzheimer’s Services, 3772 North Blvd., Baton Rouge, La. 70806.
   
   What’s not included in Coach’s obituary is that he was an amateur magician. He was only around 5’4″ and wrestled at a modest 135 or so pounds, and his hands were so small that he couldn’t hide a standard-sized Bicycle card in back palm, yet he began every season with a smile and his hand held high in the air with a playing card poking between his fingers, snapping it into his fingertips as if he was Cardini. I missed his funeral that March because I was on sabbatical for something less important than seeing Mrs. K in her time of grief, which is probably another reason he had been on my mind so much in March of 2019. ↩︎