Looking for Willie George

 By Jeffrey D. Boldt

 

“The horror! The horror!”

—Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

The divorce hadn’t come as a huge surprise, but my somewhat clichéd reaction to it — reaching out to old friends — did. Isabella had gotten bored with our life in La Crosse, Wisconsin, a pretty but stagnant little college town on the Upper Mississippi at the Minnesota border. Through the magic of Facebook, she’d rekindled an old romance with a former flame back in Quito, Ecuador, where she’d grown up.

As our married years went by (an unlucky baker’s dozen), Isabella had grown more rather than less homesick. We still loved each other, but the sorrow of this indisputable fact — the grief of which stretched down the Mississippi through the Gulf of Mexico and along the Pacific to Ecuador — had overwhelmed all of our best efforts to make our marriage work.

She came to me in tears. “I’m so sorry; you know how much I care. I’ll always love you, Ed. It’s just that my life is there.”

“Of course it hurts—” more than I could say, “But I understand, I really do, and I’m very sorry we couldn’t figure it out here.”

Six months later I was back in New York, looking for my old friend Willie George. Over the years of our marriage and the time that I’d left New York for the Midwest, I’d lost touch with a number of close male friends but none better than Willie. Oddly determined to find him, and Columbia-trained English scholar that I am, I’d started with his letters to me.

The last one was dated September 26, 1983. Characteristically droll, he’d thanked me for my “gracious hospitality and delicious (and dioecious — look it up, dude) herb.” Willie loved using obscure words, which had sometimes slowed down the narratives he wrote for my writing workshop.

Of African descent and a native of British Guyana, Willie was a talented if self-taught writer who wanted to be nothing less than the ‘Black Conrad.’ When I’d known him thirty years ago, he’d wanted to put his tiny country in Caribbean South America on the map of world literature.

His love of literature was largely driven by his need to tell the story of the legacy of colonialism from the perspective of one whose family had been plucked out of West Africa and brought to a land so obscure that its primary place in the world’s imagination had to do with the mass suicide of foreigners whose deaths informed the phrase ‘drinking the Kool-Aid.’

The letter continued that he’d especially “enjoyed the Chekhov play at the Guthrie in Minneapolis, and smoking the peace pipe above the mighty Mississippi. You drew some stories out of me there that I hadn’t told anyone and, of course, I trust you to keep it between us. Becoming a North American has been a wild ride— there was a name change and a marriage that the INS questioned along the way.”

That was one clue that finding him could be harder than I thought. There was a second, in plain sight in his letter to me, in a dashed PS. —I have completed the certificate program in International Banking and am being considered for trainee spots on three continents. Three continents — where to begin?

Google yielded nothing but false leads, and Facebook led only to one angry e-mail in capital letters and a crazed font demanding that I STOP SENDING ME FRIEND REQUESTS! So I had no choice but to go back to New York.

At the semester break, I found myself uncertainly landing La Guardia, negotiating a taxi ride to the Hampton Inn Chelsea on 38th Street. My plan was to look for Willie by day and take in a play and visit old haunts by night. But I really hadn’t thought very far ahead, so the next morning I simply started calling the numbers for W, Willie or Wilfred George in Brooklyn and Queens. “Hello may I speak to Willie George?”

“Speaking,” replied a polite Caribbean voice. “How can I help you?”

“I’ve lost track of my old friend Wilfred George, a banker by profession, a gentleman of about 50 from British Guyana — you wouldn’t happen to be any relation?”

“No sir, but Wilfred George is a very common name in our part of the world. If your friend is from Guyana, I would direct you to the web aggregator and Yellow Pages of New Yorkers from Guyana. Good luck and good day.”

I spent the next hours poring over the Directory of Guyanese on the Internet on my iPad. I was happy to be back in New York —  it was an almost sensual delight to feel the City’s great big pulsating body next to mine; the tall buildings gave me the same feeling of scale as the Upper Mississippi bluffs, like my little life wasn’t that important in the grand scheme of things.

Soon I had two promising leads. The first was a plumber in Jamaica Queens whose wife said he had a cousin named Willie George; the second was a Jeremiah George who I was meeting in a bar in Prospect Park Brooklyn at 7pm that night. The latter claimed to be Willie’s brother and said he’s heard many stories about me, the white English Professor!

There were some at least reddish flags that didn’t ring quite true in the latter’s story — references to a Shakespeare class I’d never taught, and to a sister I’d never heard of before. But Willie had always been a little dodgy and maybe I simply hadn’t remembered things right. It had been thirty years.

Why had I set off on this unlikely quest? Oh yeah, our divorce.

****

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?

****

I took the F train over the Brooklyn Bridge, thinking of Hart Crane, Walt Whitman and mostly of an old girlfriend (of her sweet voice) who’d lived on Prospect Park West. Screw my whole quest to find Willie George! He was just an old friend, after all, and would finding him really change anything anyway? Even if the brother shocked me by producing him in Park Slope, I would still be wedded to my life in the Midwest rather than to Isabella, the woman I loved.

When I walked into the bar, a tall black man immediately approached me. “How are you Professor?” he asked extending his hand. “I am Jeremiah George, your friend Willie’s brother. How are you this evening, man?”

I gathered right away that he was not really Willie’s brother. Not only did he not look like one bit like my old friend, his accent was different as well — the short ‘a’ of man was more like an “o,’ more open and Jamaican than Willie’s. “Can I buy you a drink, Jeremiah?”

“You can indeed, sir.” Or maybe more like an African American man pretending to be Jamaican? How was I going to escape this guy? Was trying to scam me somehow?

“Where does your brother Willie live these days?”

“Well that’s what I was meaning to tell you, sir, my brother Willie has passed for three years now.”

“I’m very sorry to hear that.”

“He was living in Brazil at the time. Heart attack took him away from us. I brought a picture of him that he sent from Rio — just before he passed.” He fumbled in his jacket for a photo, and, indeed it was not my old friend!

“That’s not the man I knew.”

Jeremiah George seemed disappointed. “Are you sure?”

I nodded, suddenly aware of the vastness of the grief in his eyes. “Your brother looks just like you, Jeremiah. Very smart.”

“We were twins.” I felt guilty thinking that he’d wanted to scam me, when he was only missing his closest friend.

“Oh, I’m so sorry,” I said, putting my arm around him awkwardly for a second. “That’s got to be very hard.”

I spent two hours at that bar, hearing stories about these two brothers and buying Jeremiah George drinks. I also told him stories about my Willie George, at Jeremiah’s urging. We parted with a handshake and he wished me luck with my other lead.

But the next morning the woman’s husband returned my call and he was not the right Willie George either. I flew back to Wisconsin the next morning.

****

Having struck out in New York, I went back to La Crosse and tried to pick up with other friends and new acquaintances — with mixed results. I knew I couldn’t replace the friendship part of my relationship with Isabella with just one person, so I found myself spending time with a variety of people, or, at least with what passed for variety in La Crosse, Wisconsin.

So I went out to a stilted lunch with Prof. X….and then had a delicious dinner at the home of Y… and then finally for drinks and some laughs with Z and her friends.

But I still couldn’t give up on the idea of re-connecting with Willie George. We’d understood each other from the first time we’d spoken. Finally, I decided the only real way to find him would be to go to British Guyana myself. It sounded like a beautiful diversion in any event.

I spent that bitterly cold Wisconsin winter reading about Guyana’s pristine rainforests, tropical wetlands teeming with exotic birds, flat-topped mountains and alluring Atlantic beaches. But the tour book also described it as ‘Conradian and raw’ and noted a history of ‘inter-ethnic tension and political instability.’ Hell yeah, a trip to this obscure English-speaking equatorial land of 800,000 residents seemed to be just what I needed to get out of my mid-career, mid-life Midwestern slump!

It was a bit expensive, but I had a free round trip flight to Quito that made it all affordable. I could catch a direct flight from Quito into Georgetown, which the book described as the country’s ‘crumbling colonial capitol famous for its edgy markets.’ That got my attention, and filled me once again with adrenaline and wanderlust. Perhaps I’d even be magnanimous and call on Isabella and Miguel? It was just an after-thought, but something about the whole trip seemed healing and right.

The first leg of travel, to Miami and then on to Quito, went perfectly smoothly. But the leg from Quito to Georgetown was delayed. I had two and then three hours to fill, so I dialed Isabella’s number. She wasn’t home and her away message was hard to comprehend.

I was so taken with hearing her honey and lemon voice in Spanish, that I may not have heard her right. I was only half listening so that I wouldn’t have to hear her say the dreaded word — Miguel. I wanted to call again, just to hear and understand her beautiful voice, but I couldn’t think of what to say in a message.

At last, we five passengers were able to board the little plane to Georgetown. It was a bumpy ride but I sat next to a nice Guyanese man, who managed to extract the purpose of my visit from me.

“Your friend Wilfred George was from Georgetown?” He was about my age and of Asian Indian descent like a plurality of Guyanese.

“I understood that his family moved there from New Amsterdam in his teens.”

“Was he a cricket player? There was well-known college player of that name when I was growing up.”

“He played but didn’t distinguish himself in the sport that I know of—”

He handed me his card. “Start at the records office that I mentioned. I work in the Government — please feel free to call me if I can be of any assistance.”

“Thank you very much, sir.”

“And welcome to the Co-operative Republic of Guyana.”

“Well-named,” I said, and he let out a deep laugh.

After two days pouring over birth records kept in the old school microfiche rolls that I loved, it began to dawn on me that Wilfred George might well have been a made up name. There was simply no record of anyone of Willie’s age being born in the two or three years before and after the age he’d told he was.

I gave up the Willie George quest and enjoyed the tropical rainforest, waterfalls and mountains of Guyana. The rainforest was a spectacular green spectacle, and one million or so acres of it had been set aside — to be managed by British conservationists in exchange for foreign aid.

I bought some amazing first British edition Penguins of Graham Greene novels, and took these books to a café and sat reading them as I enjoyed the delicious Caribbean coffee and sun.

I had seen the search for Willie George through — all the way back to Georgetown, British Guyana, and I was now very ready to move on with my own life. I had a layover in Quito and would stop in and wish Isabella well.

****

The cab driver seemed a little shady — it took longer than I’d expected to get into the fashionable Spanish Colonial section of Quito where Isabella and Miguel lived. Just another cost of my morbid curiosity, I reckoned — paying him and walking toward the elegant pink-washed row home where Isabella had landed.

There was so much history here, much of it brutal, but there was also the saving grace of the architecture. The City of Quito was a UN World Heritage site, in large part because of the 16th Century churches and monasteries, but also for calm and grace of these sun-dried brick homes, covered with pastel-washed plaster and stucco.

How could a people capable of such refinement also be capable of such savagery against the Inca Empire and the gentle local mountain tribes that belonged here, that had evolved here as naturally as the brightly colored flowers of the Andes? It was the same story everywhere; just down the Mississippi from La Crosse there was a marker for the Bad Axe Massacre undertaken by U.S. troops against fleeing Sauk families crossing the river.

Brutality was part of World Heritage, too.

Number 146 was not the pink row home, but the salmon and burgundy one next to it. I started toward it, but lost my courage and walked up the block enjoying the sun and flowers, the almost-Moorish Old Spanish Quarter ambiance. I was here in Quito; there was no question I had to speak to Isabella, to force myself to meet her new man, Miguel.

As I rounded the corner back toward their house, I saw Isabella enter the house just after a man who was much bulkier than the sophisticated upper class Ecuadoran I’d pictured in my imagination. But it was my unmistakably my dear Isabella — who’d been my whole world — my great joy for a decade as she had become my grief over the past year.

I suppose many would have judged her to be no great beauty. Isabella was a small woman with uneven teeth — her nose could be a little jarring and prominent from certain angles, as it had presented now, going into her elegant town house. But how I’d loved and desired her! Even if we’d been born of and belonged to two different continents, our marriage had for a time existed in a country of our own making. It was down to earth and real. We had good communication, great sex, much laughter, and a profound and simple happiness in our companionship.

Our love had had both poetry and prose — all it had lacked was a common sense of place where it could be sustained.

I rang the doorbell and Isabella greeted me with a hug! “Edward what an unexpected pleasure!” Her smile was genuine, and here, too, was her precious little body, wrapped up where it belonged in my arms.

“I’m sorry, very sorry. I know I should have called. I did try, last week.”

Holding her, ever so briefly, I felt again the magnitude of what I’d lost. And I knew at last why I’d gone looking for Willie George. I’d been looking not for Willie but for a familiar face to ease my pain; I knew that friendship and love were the only cure for loneliness.

“No, it’s a good thing! It’s time you know the truth, Johnny,” she called to the man in another room, “Edward’s here.”

“Eddie!” In walked a black man with a beard, who looked very much like my old friend Willie George, but for his thicker frame and massive jowls. “Eddie, it so nice to see you again,” said the man embracing me in a massive bear hug.

“Willie?”

“Yes, it’s me old friend,” he said sheepishly. It was almost as though young Willie’s head had been grafted on a much larger man’s neck and jowls.

He’s fat, I thought, almost grotesquely so! I knew this thought was petty and cruel but I relished it! The cruelest thoughts always come from people in pain.

Their story spilled out of them. Willie George was not his real name, but a name he’d used in the U.S. to avoid customs issues. Jonathon Bryant, the real Willie, had slowly worked his way up in international banking and had become a Vice President for South American operations with a large British bank in the last couple of years. He’d been transferred to Quito two years ago.

The story about a Facebook flirtation was true, and Isabella swore there had never been any physical intimacy — the phrase seared my soul — on any of her visits home, although she had seen him the last time and they’d plotted her escape. They were terribly torn about whether or not to tell me, and just when they’d resolved not to, I’d started my ridiculous (they said touching) effort to find him. They were surprised that I’d gone all the way to British Guyana trying to find him. At that point I cut them off.

“Por favor — no más!” My unexpected, American accented Spanish made all three of us laugh—Isabella and me through our tears.

So I added, looking at Willie but not smiling. “The horror! The horror!”

He winced, remembering his Conrad. It meant I was dying.

After a few awkward pleasantries, Isabella drove me back to the airport. She apologized several times. We hugged silently and then I turned back to her. “Willie, I mean Johnny — he’s not a bad guy. He’s very kind and he respects women, or at least he did when I knew him. To be honest, I feel completely humiliated but I’m glad you’re with a man like that.”

“I still love you Ed.”

“Me too, my darling Isabella.” But I understood profoundly at that moment that you had to go forward, not backward, in life.

The flight was on time and the plane slowly rose into the sky. As I looked out over Quito and the mountains beyond, I thought of how lucky Johnny and Isabella were to have each other; and, if I could just overcome the shock of this useless jealousy, of how lucky I could be to have them both once again my friends.

But it’s been two years since that day in Quito and I still don’t answer their e-mails or return their calls.

Jeffrey D. Boldt has published more than 100 short stories, poems, and essays. His work has appeared in The Wallace Stevens Journal, Berkeley Poetry Review, Tikkun, and The Missing Slate, among others. He has a short story forthcoming in The MacGuffin.