Have Glove, Will Travel_ Adventures of a Baseball Vagabond - Bill Lee [69]
We waited a long time at the luggage carousel for our bags. The windshield for a ’57 Chevy spun out first, followed by four slightly balding white wall tires, a wounded transmission held intact with duct tape and copper wire, four more frayed tires sans white walls, a grease-caked muffler sporting a large dent, a peeling chrome bumper, a twisted carburetor and a box of vintage spark plugs wrapped in rubber bands and twine. I figured someone was bringing in parts to fix Fidel’s car.
Two Cultural Department attachés greeted me in the waiting lounge. We rode off in their new Saab, a vehicle that passed for a Rolls-Royce in that part of the world. The clock glowing in the dashboard read nearly midnight. Not a car on the modern, immaculate three-lane road. With Ruben Blades and Tito Puente blasting from the stereo, I sat in the backseat popping open bottles of Cerveza Cristal, Cuba’s most popular beer, from an ice-filled cooler. My companions peppered me with questions about American baseball: How hard did Roger Clemens throw? Was Tony Gwynn as good a hitter as Tony Oliva? Could Luis Tiant really smoke a cigar in a shower without getting the tobacco wet?
Our Saab traveled the 150 kilometers to a mountain town called Vinales in under ninety minutes, but I measured the distance in six-packs. We reached our destination only after the two Cuban attachés and I had consumed so many bottles of Cerveza Cristal, my jaw had numbed. You could have used a hand grenade to extract all my teeth without applying any other anesthesia. I would not have felt a thing.
A spectral moon beamed over Vinales, a secluded spot surrounded by limestone cliffs overlooking a thriving green valley. My hotel appeared as quaint and homey as a bed-and-breakfast inn, but the designers had built it on eccentric angles that closely followed the rolling contours of the hill it sat on. Either that or the hotel was about to slide from its moorings. Someone later told me that a group of Cuban army engineers had constructed the place. My guess is they had used prefab materials to produce a building they could quickly dismantle in case G. Gordon Liddy ever convinced Pat Robertson to finance another Bay of Pigs invasion.
My memory of checking in remains sketchy. After so many beers, an elemental homing device automatically activates to lead me through any alcoholic haze to some safe port. I do recollect waking up early the next morning to a rural paradise.
This part of Cuba could have passed for Craftsbury, Vermont. A cooling sea mist hung over the valley, silent at six a.m. except for the peal of oxen bells. From my window, I saw a Cuban farmer, his face shadowed beneath a sombrero, plowing his field with a team of oxen. A bright winged parrot perched on the back of one beast. Anytime the farmer wanted the oxen to change direction, he released a machine gun splatter of Spanish that made me think of a football quarterback calling audibles. Whatever he said was unintelligible to human ears, but the animals understood and immediately altered their course.
Chickens, tomcats, and black pigs ran wild over the grounds like a squad of drunken USC freshmen gone amok on their first panty raid. The air smelled brisk and sweet, with the fragrance of morning glories masking the gamy underscent of fresh tobacco.
The first rays of the morning sun dazzled me. I had never seen a light quite this luminous, with a color so indescribable it seemed part of a mutant spectrum. As it crept into my room, everything suddenly became starker, more alive. I imagined the furniture had started breathing. My bed and armoire were damn near pulsating. I could not tell if the sunlight had miraculously animated these lifeless objects or if the pure environment had simply hoisted my consciousness to some higher plane.
Then again, perhaps it was nothing more than those psychedelic mushrooms I had ingested while listening to my first Jimi Hendrix album, finally kicking back on me. It sure