Its Snowing in the Heart of Darkness

I learned rudimentary Spanish in New York food shopping on the Lower East Side. "Mira, Mira," the kids shouted, to what I have no idea, probably to the blind beggar hanging just outside the doors. As if poor mister blind man reduced to a passerby's benevolence would suddenly regain his eyesight and answer back. My Spanish progressed from there to shell game epithets and eventually to Lambada Portuguese.

New York in my mind is always snowy, dirty slush, dark gray and garbage brown. You learn to walk looking straight ahead avoiding the cracks in the sidewalk and the stamped metal covers hinged over stairs leading down into steampipe cellars. You learn that all of life is like that, if you want to avoid being diverted from whatever was your destination, you don't look anywhere but that distant glazed somewhere that you think you are going.

I used to think I had a destination, but really, my destination was to walk under Miles's window and mark time until the sweetness of his tenor sax put a soundtrack to the movements of the people and the one-man parade of the commoner King in ermine robes who carried his little feline princes stacked pyramid-style in a radio flyer, Mira Mira.


I got stranded in the snow in midtown one night, everything was silent, no buses, no people, I'd stayed too long and late at one location and wanted to go home. A lone limo snaked up sixth avenue and I was young enough and trusting enough to accept a ride. The gentleman in the back wanted to know all about me, what I did, what I thought, and we are always ready with charming answers, aren't we? As the limo neared my block I realized I learned nothing about him, I wanted something to remember, something more than being saved from hypothermia, so I started interrogating in an unassuming way of course, obviously this man and his driver were very decent people. He was an actor he said.


Well, then are you famous? Do films? Anything I would have seen? He wasn't sure what I'd seen, he thought I might like his most recent work, Apocalypse Now, it would be showing up soon. And that was that.


I couldn't wait for the film. As soon as I saw it advertised, I purchased tickets and camped outside the theater until it was time for the lines to file in. I pretended I was fainting so I could be first in the door. My brother played along, notifying the attendants. Studying the show cards in the lobby, the crowd still outside, I saw my savior was Robert Duvall.


I loved the movie, it changed me forever. I started wearing an Army/Navy surplus flak jacket and asking questions like "Who's in charge here?" I became a sort of walking encyclopedia on the film, the trouble they'd had making it, the actors, the lines, which led me to Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and the Ivory Wars. I began to notice things I wouldn't have otherwise.

I traveled to Iquitos and chronicled the aftermath of the rubber rape. I stayed in huts deep in the jungle and got drunk on midnight canoe rides while missionaries converted children and crocodiles slithered at the waters edge. It was a place you learned to look straight ahead while leaping over tarantula caves or crossing tributaries on a slender branch without providing a meal for the Piranha.


I saw that life is a riverboat moving with the currents where strange and evil reptiles and frightened monkeys hang from trees overhead as you glide along. It is true we can pass a savage genocide in progress and we can pass the business interests responsible just a little farther up the bend. Mira Mira. But if you get off the boat, you are guaranteed to have hungry tigers jumping on you as you're trying to wade waist high to safe shores or you will find yourself an unwelcome intruder smack in the middle of someone else's Apocalypse where grocery clerks and errand boys serve a mad god on his way into a worse hell than the one you already thought you found.