Walking Through Walls Read Free Page B

babies.”
    Me? I was a happy little kid running around in the backyard, climbing almond and banyan trees, picking wild bananas, and watching the stars that seemed just a few feet away. Pop was fascinated by the fecund nature that surrounded us and at times overtook us. It was not unusual that strangler vines, enormous frogs, blackbirds, and assorted moths the size of your hand would find their way in through cracks in the screen and start to take over our home.
    Pop loved to watch the garden snakes spiral up the rake handle as he worked in the yard. The pretty ones, like coral snakes, were the ones that killed you fast. He made me memorize each name and picture of all the poisonous snakes from his pocket-size snake identifier book. At least once or twice a month, I would wake up and find some stray garden snake crawling in my bed. How they got in was a mystery we could never solve. But they liked my warm bed a lot more than the dew-soaked late-night earth out back. Like a good scout, I trapped them in a brown grocery bag and threw them in the garbage. In the morning, Pop opened the can and released them back into the wild. To him all life was precious, even a snake’s. Sometimes for entertainment he brought them in the house so he could watch them slither along the cool terrazzo floor. Mom would run screaming into the bedroom.
    Science, nature, and invention always fascinated my father. Pop used the backyard not only to explore nature but to look toward the heavens. For years, he would take me outside at night and we would scan the starry skies with an old pair of binoculars. Over time I learned all the constellations and would get excited when we would spot planets such as Venus or Mars. I remember one night when Pop became silent as he slowly tracked a moving object for several minutes. He had never seen anything like this bright light traveling across the sky. For someone born in 1904, witnessing a man-made object sail through space was a miracle he could never have imagined. Night after night we would watch Echo, NASA’s first experimental communications satellite, which was not much more than an inflated Mylar balloon, silently letting the world know that significant changes were about to arrive.
    Meanwhile back on earth, life couldn’t have been better. Slowly my mother was transforming herself into hostess with the mostess. Mom took to cutting out the latest recipes from House and Garden and Vogue for her nights of entertaining. Small and incandescently beautiful, she did modern dance, read the society column, and entertained poets and homosexuals. You get the picture: Gertrude Stein meets Hee Haw .
    On Sundays, with great regularity, she gathered Miami’s best and brightest, often as many as forty people, for champagne and lobster Newburg served in a copper chafing dish. Tiki torches lit up the backyard, and couples gathered in the shadow of the black smoke from the hurricane lamps burning kerosene. Mambo and calypso music played from the stereo system. Japanese paper lanterns illuminated the lanai.
    Probably 80 or 90 percent of the guests were decorators. Since my father was the only heterosexual decorator in Miami (and quite possibly in the entire world), my parents’ parties tended to be large gatherings of gay men. At the time, there were no gay bars in Miami, and “the boys,” as my mother referred to them, had to meet somewhere. That somewhere was either my parents’ house or the Coconut Grove Pharmacy, known locally as the Coconut Grove Fagacy, where on weekends men in tight white jeans would sit around the U-shaped soda fountain counter seductively sipping chocolate milk shakes with red straws while keeping one eye cocked on the men’s room to see who went in but did not come out.
    At our Sunday afternoon get-togethers, the men always cooed about how adorable I was, which drove my mother insane with both fear and pride. I am sure she had visions of me being raped out back