Rosetta Stone

In a few weeks, on the anniversary of Camilo Cienfuegos' disappearance back in 1959, all the school kids in Cuba will throw flowers into the sea or, if they're inland, in rivers for him. His plane went down in waters near Havana and nobody ever found the wreckage. Che named his son after him. I nearly got to meet this Camilo Guevara last year as a marine archaeologist friend of mine over there knows him. Didn't pan out. You'd like the original Camilo's face, especially under the huge hat he wore. He was the last man to join the 82 members on the boat that Castro led to kickoff the revolution. They only let him on because he was skinny. His smile just has a way of forgiving you for everything you've ever done. It's everywhere over there. I was thinking about you checking in over here today. I had some wood that I'd left out in the rain that was a little disagreeable in the fireplace. Lighter fluid proved persuasive and the cat came over to keep me company. He has a nifty habit of dancing around every time the wood crackles. After a while he regains his composure and settles down again and reads over my shoulder. Marquez keeps his attention. I had all these little points written on the back of both hands to mention tonight but the rain smeared them. Now I have to wing it. It's weird writing when you talk on the phone everyday. It has this sorta lame perfunctory feeling, like kissing under Mistletoe or posing for a photo. One time an ex told me all my knee-jerk, 3rd rate Brando mirror and camera faces never carried over to real life. She enjoyed this because it meant I'd never know what faces she'd fallen for. That was something I was turning over in the rain this afternoon: is everybody rigged to fall in love with somebody? By *somebody*, obviously I mean YOU. By *everybody*, obviously I mean me. I walked a long way watching clouds as if they were people I knew sleeping. I want a mask of the face of everybody I've ever known. Maybe a few from everybody. The kid mask, grownup, and geezer. I want to mount them on a wall. From the first face to the last. When I was a kid I had this deal with crushes, I always made a pact with myself to see their face as the last thing before I fell asleep. I have a lot of trouble getting used to faces. I figured this practice would help me get over the real dozy numbers so I could at least have a hope in hell of not giving the whole game away every time they asked me for an eraser or what time it was. But it made the problem worse. Too many people grow on me. I look around for neighborhoods I think you might like around here. Ones without perfume. Nothing in this town has any baggage or childhood files except one place, which is all junk halos under humming neon motel signs. But there are a bunch of pockets. This one's close to the park that steals the show when the leaves turn color. That one looks like it's made of LEGO and I'm just showing it to you because someone paid to live there. I lived in this area for a year and if you're high enough up in some apartment all the others look like chocolate Christmas calendars at night when the windows glow in the dark. It's weird trying to pick. There was one neighborhood where the only thing I knew about it was one summer afternoon five years ago I fucked a girl who stole the key to the roof of the building 16 stories up. You had the whole city up there, off one edge of the roof the forest was a doormat and everywhere else the mountains spun in different shades of blue all the way across the milky sky until the after-dinner-mint colored skyline of the city looked like a sandcastle. Everything's glass here. Sunsets catch it occasionally and you get molten smothering over the whole town in a tidal wave of glint. Where else is some pay dirt? A lot of the homes have a weird way of welcoming you with, "Hi, when are you leaving?" Let's avoid those. Traffic lights wink continuously, because this place goes to sleep at 10pm. Power wires and bus lines and telephone polls are sheet music. Logos and insignias all over the place stamps to a shitty love letter or suicide note depending on how you look at capitalism. They all talk about themselves in the third person. Try to keep a straight face. Horoscopes on the bus, revolving door eyed pedestrians, train wrecks of guilty cigarettes in ashtrays, the zoo is still there but it's extinct, my ex worked at that tanning salon across the street... Yeah, but it doesn't matter anyhow. You'll be using my hometown as chaser for Havana.