Looking for Willie George

I’d hoped the sandstone bluffs and hiking trails of La Crosse, and our tidy two-story house nestled beneath them—along with frequent trips back to Quito for the holidays—would be enough to hold her here. But it wasn’t.

One day I saw her in a crowd of students across campus, where she worked as a Spanish Department secretary. When I saw her sad brown-eyed face, I felt both moved and afraid. The professor in me thought of T.S Eliot’s lines about some “infinitely gentle/infinitely suffering thing,” but mainly I was scared that she would leave me.

I would have gladly settled in Quito myself, but there wasn’t much use for an English professor whose specialty was the relationship between two relatively obscure American poets, who between them had only two thin volumes translated into Spanish. And, I said — I’d worked too hard to get tenure to teach English in some night school in Quito.

I was trying to accept that it was not meant to be, and I was left to fill the void that Isabella had left in my life. Isabella (my little Andes wildflower) could blossom back in the sun and warmth of her native soil — but what would become of me?

I missed the close male friends of my youth, and it was this feeling that led me to my long search for Willie George. What I wanted in a friend was the easy camaraderie, humor and candor that Willie and I’d forged back in my years in New York in the early 1980’s.

I was a grad student at Columbia then and, trying to make ends meet, taught a night school class on creative writing that I advertised solely in funky bookstores and cafes around the City. I was thrilled when a dozen or so writers showed up — willing to pay me $125 to gather together Tuesday nights and occasionally receive my red-penned notes in the margins of their stories, plays and novels. Willie was there from the very first group.

Looking back from the vantage point of my early 50’s, it’s hard for me to believe that Willie, too, was only in his 20’s when we first met. He worked at a bank on Wall Street and would arrive in his pressed-shirt, tie and jacket — while most of the rest of my other students arrived sporting the scrupulously casual look that I favored myself. He was certainly among the most talented of my students, and unlike many of the others he had interesting stories to tell.

His first creative non-fiction piece was the true story of a mistake he’d made in his bank job. On the same day that Reagan and Thatcher had cut off credit to the new Sandinista government, he’d erroneously paid a letter of credit claim of $100 million dollars to a bank in Nicaragua. He wrote a personal letter to Daniel Ortega, explaining that he was just a humble clerk from British Guyana and that his job might be on the line — could they please just give the money back?

All of his co-workers, and especially the richly-drawn character of his archconservative white Haitian boss, had seen this as a fool’s errand. But ten days later he received a letter in a fancy blue envelope from Umberto Ortega, the new President’s brother. Willie’s letter had touched them, he wrote, and the Nicaraguan Government would take up Willie’s request at the next Cabinet meeting. Within the week, the funds were returned by telex. Willie’s thoughtful piece put the return in the context of the Sandinistas wanting to obtain credit from the big banks in the future.

It was an interesting and well-told story, and I encouraged him to send it to the Village Voice, where I had a bit of a connection. But Willie was worried about repercussions at work, and made hints, too, about his concerns about his immigration status.

Willie spoke a tropical slightly syncopated English — which would rise up into a ready and un-pretentious laugh that seemed at odds with the formality of his dress and manners. It was that rich laugh that I remembered and missed now. And the way he said writing — are you Rye Teen anything interesting, Ed? Oh, and that we both loved Anton Chekhov and Jane Austen. We became fast friends.

We were soon pub-crawling not just after class but two or three other nights after work —playing chess and taking stout and dinner together Tuesday nights at O’Hara’s — even smoking the occasional reefer in various New York alleys and parks before progressing to hanging out in each other’s pathetically small apartment(s).

We were an unusual pair — proper Willie, a carob-colored African Caribbean with a neatly trimmed beard, and sarcastic me — a fair-skinned and blue-eyed Norwegian Midwesterner with long blonde hair — more like the market-driven buddies of some Hollywood film than real friends one saw walking the streets of New York.

But friends we were, debating books, making each other howl with more or less witty banter, going to a Knicks game or a Marvin Gaye concert, and, best of all, seemingly having the ability to bring out the flirtatious best of pairs of women of every race, creed and color in bars from Spanish Harlem to the Financial District.

At times it seemed like the latter was the fuel that kept our friendship going, our obvious rapport and bonhomie attracted women who wanted in on our jokes, joints and jaunty but high-toned literary jousting. But soon we’d even moved beyond being each other’s salt-meets-pepper Wingman — we were best buddies for the next three years.

How did one lose touch with such a rare and true friend? It was more my fault than his.

Willie even came out to Wisconsin and sat in on one of my classes when I got my job at the University of Wisconsin campus. Isabella and I had just married, and Willie was an interesting Spanish-speaking old friend to pull out of my past in mostly white, culturally homogenous La Crosse.

The good nuns of Guyana had given young Wilfred excellent Spanish, and Portuguese. Then he’d lived for a while in Buenos Aires before coming to New York — Willie said he’d have stayed there if the political vibe hadn’t gotten too creepy for him.

I had some high school Spanish but couldn’t get the Italian-inflected Argentine version of it that made Isabella giggle. There was some kind of little South American spark and bravado between them — especially in Spanish — but Isabella was busy and on a deadline, so Willie and I spent most of his visit alone.

We hiked the steep bluffs of La Crosse, and drove up the stunning river road to Minneapolis to take in The Cherry Orchard at the Guthrie. Driving back along the river late that night, Willie told me some secrets he’d never spilled in all of our three years in the bars of New York. Looking out across the sloughs and sandbars of the wide river to the dark shadowy bluffs on the Minnesota side, Willie shook his head. “Man, I never thought I’d be driving along Mark Twain’s river!”

“Yeah, you’re in the middle of Middle America now.” There was that rich laugh.

“Waiting for you to put us both on a raft,” Willie teased, adding in a southern drawl, “Sometimes we’d have that whole ree-va to ourselves for the longest time.”

“I’m impressed.”

“We had to read Huckleberry Finn in high school.”

“In freaking Guyana? I had some friends in high school who did that whole raft trip the summer they graduated, all the way to New Orleans.”

“Cool. You know, I came here on a student visa, but when it ran out I just hung out here more or less illegally. I just lied and said I was from the U.S. Virgin Islands. I even had a fake driver’s license from there and that was enough to get me my job at the bank. So maybe two months after they hired me, I’m at a party and they bring me another new employee and they say, this guy is from the Virgin Islands, too.”

“Damn, what happened?”

“We start talking about St. George this St. Albans that and the guy asks me about bars and restaurants and I keep saying, yeah sure, I love that place — and I’m like fuck, is this guy from ICE or what? But then it slowly occurs to me that he’s BS’ing, too — he wasn’t from the Virgin Islands any more than I was!”

“That’s amazing!” I grinned. “Hey, I know it’s late, but do you want to see one of my favorite hiking spots?”

Willie nodded, and I turned off the river road and we went into Perrot State Park. “The great Monsieur Nicolas Perrot was an explorer, and fur trader. He was one of the first Europeans in the Upper Mississippi Valley, in the 1680’s. He learned all of the native languages, and even settled some old disputes among native tribes. He was up here, though, on behalf of the Sun King, Louis XIVth.”

“You know your shit, Dr. Ed.”

“That past has always sort of haunted me. For the most part, the French got along fine with the native people, they inter-married and became the Metis people. I always wondered: what would North America have been like if the tolerant French rather than the British had been dominant in the U.S.?”

“Well the French weren’t that much better in Guyana, that much I know. Ever hear of Ile du Diable, Devil’s Island? It was a notorious prison off the Guyanese coast–they took Captain Dreyfus and plenty of native people there. It was actually a prison leper colony, too, for awhile.”

“You know your history, too.” Willie was following me up the steep face of Brady’s Bluff, a climb I’d come to love in my time in the La Crosse area. “Doing any writing lately?”

“Always working on something — wasn’t that our motto?”

It was a wonderful summer night on top of Brady’s Bluff, with the sloughs and wetlands and bluffs of the Upper Mississippi in dark silhouettes before us, and, seemingly, the whole history of the Americas — from northern South America to the Upper Midwest of North America —within the bounds and bonds of our shared interests and experience.

How could I have lost track of such a friend?

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