For my birthday, the gang threw me a party. The gifts were of gold and silver.
"Where are you going from here?" Monica asked one day.
"I'm not sure. The monsoon's starting in India, right? So I guess I can't go back there. What's the monsoon like?"
"Hoo, boy—it pours every day all day. It's impossible to stay in Goa in the summer. It's the time to do business and hang out somewhere hunky dory till the rains stop."
"How long does it last?"
"People start going back to India in September."
"I heard someone mention Bali. Ever been there?" I asked.
"No, but I've been thinking of going. Why don't we go together."
"Great! I want to visit Momsy in New York first. I'll meet you later."
"Okey dokey. Leave me your number and I'll call."
I prepared for New York. Airports had recently begun frisking people for weapons. Since I didn't want to be caught going into the States with a mass of cash, I decided to take the train. I phoned ahead, so Momsy would expect me, then enjoyed the relaxing train ride, feeling like a business traveller.
"Baby, is that you?" came her muffled voice as I entered the apartment.
"Momsy? Where are you?"
"Over here, in the closet. Do you think you could help me . . ." (She grunted.) "I'm trying to make room for . . . Oh, nuts!"
I entered her ballroom-sized walk-in and peered through a cluster of hanging clothes. Momsy." She looked so sad standing there with a finger in her mouth amid a pile of hat boxes. "What's the matter?"
"Fudge, I broke a nail," she answered.
When Momsy told me Aunt Sathe was in town from Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, I hopped with excitement. Usually Aunt Sathe made only day trips to New York to see her migraine doctor, but this time she was staying overnight in a hotel in order to do some shopping. Though Momsy didn't get along with Aunt Sathe, I thought she was nifty. Tall and slim, she advertised electrical equipment on local Wilkes-Barre TV. She was also a bit wild. During my teen years. I'd turned on my cousin Matthew to marijuana, which I liked in those days. He, subsequently, had turned on his mother, and after that, whenever I'd visit, the three of us would retire to the basement for a puff. I could discuss things with Aunt Sathe I wouldn't dare with Momsy. Now, hearing she was in town, I couldn't wait to see her.
As soon as she opened her hotel room door I grabbed her in a hug. "AUNT SATHE!"
She responded with her usual heart-warming, "TATALA!"—an old endearment. Aunt Sathe and the Wilkes-Barre branch of the family came from the Orthodox end of Judaism. She kept a kosher house and generously sprinkled her dialogue with Yiddish. Momsy, on the other hand, prided herself on her big-city worldliness and wouldn't be caught dead with a word of Yiddish in her mouth.
Aunt Sathe and I sat on the bed, and she held my hand as I told her about Goa and India. Then I dumped my cash on the coffee table. It formed a considerable mound.
Her mouth opened. "Oy vey, tatala. What did you do, rob a bank?"
I had just completed, in my eyes, a remarkable feat and felt triumphant about my accomplishments. I'd travelled around the world for three years and returned with a load of money. I was a success.
I told Aunt Sathe the truth.
At first she was shocked and apprehensive. But the longer she sat before the cash, the more she mellowed. She picked up a rubber-banded packet of fifty hundred-dollar bills.
"What if you got caught, you shmeggeggy you?" she said.
"No chance. If you look good, you don't even have to go through Customs. Not in Canada."
"Oy, sounds like mishears to me."
By the end of the afternoon, she began to have visions herself. Though Aunt Sathe had not needed to work after her divorce from my uncle, I knew that grand vacations and thousand-dollar dresses were no longer a part of her everyday life.
"You know, tatala," she said, "I've been thinking for a while now. There are no eligible men in Wilkes-Barre, and believe you me when I tell you I've looked. There's not one worth this much of my little finger. I have to get out, go somewhere. I wonder . . . Maybe . . . Do you think you could include your old aunt in one of those deals?"
I thought she was kidding.
"Now? What do you think?" she pressed. "Nothing dangerous, of course."
Aunt Sathe was serious.
"Didn't think I had the chutzpah, did you?" She crossed one long leg over the other and looked into another packet of hundreds. Aunt Sathe was really serious.
I didn't like the proposal at all. How could I involve my aunt in a scam? Could I send her through Customs with a set of cases? I looked closer at the elegant woman caressing her chin with hundred dollar bills. She was poised and chic and classy. No one would ever suspect her. Not in a million years. But she was my aunt!
At the end of the visit she reminded me, "You won't forget me now, will you, shana maidala?"
I shook my head but dismissed the idea from my mind.
Meanwhile, I ran out of dope again. I didn't want to find out how I'd feel without it. I searched the streets of Greenwich Village in the hope of finding something there. As I crossed Bleecker Street I heard someone call my name. It was an older version of someone I'd hung out with as a teenager. And it turned out that Older Version had been on the methadone program for years, though at present he was clean and working in a T-shirt store.
"Please, please," I begged him. "Score me some smack."
It took time to persuade him, but eventually he agreed. After I waited impatiently in his store for two hours, he finally brought me a packet, from which he'd taken some as commission.
Oh, a little snoot felt so good. I loved the feel of it seeping through my body.
But scoring the next day, and the day after that, and the day after that was an enormous hassle. It entailed begging Older Version to go and then waiting ages after he finally agreed.
"Baby?" Momsy said one day as I sat, miserable, by the phone in my third hour of waiting for Older Version to call me back.
"What?" I answered grumpily, not wanting to leave the instrument that was going to ring any second.
"I need your help."
I found Momsy in the dining room with her hands on her hips and a frown on her forehead. "I can't five with this upholstery another day," she said. "Look how the sun changed the colour over there. What do you think of a snazzy print to replace it? Creamish, maybe."
I shrugged. "I'm waiting for this guy to call."
"Or do you think a print would make the room too busy?"
I shrugged again. Two hours later. Older Version still hadn't phoned. New York was a real drag. I was ecstatic when Monica called and said she was ready.
Monica and I agreed to meet in Amsterdam and timed our flights to arrive within an hour of each other. I spotted her halfway across the international waiting room. Tall, blonde, and Nordic, with a guitar case on her hack, she was hard to miss.
We ran into each other's arms. After New York, it felt especially great to be back with my Goa friend.
"I have a hunky dory place for us to stay while we're here." she said. "You know Amsterdam Dean? I have the address of his houseboat."
I'd first met Amsterdam Dean when he'd been Saddhu George's roommate. We became better acquainted over the season. During the extended stay in Bombay, while Dayid, Ashley, and Kadir had succumbed to Bombay Syndrome—so engrossed in partying that business was delayed—Dean had a birthday party at the Horizon Hotel in Juhu Beach. The ballroom of the five-star hotel had been rented for the occasion and packed with Goa Freaks. Several rooms in the hotel had also been reserved and turned into opium dens, complete with opium baba and smoking paraphernalia. After hours coked-out at the party, the opium had been a delicious respite. I'd been impressed, and the idea of staying on his houseboat appealed to me.