A Trip to the Stars (19 page)

Among other things, Calzas came to serve as my guide and overseer in the urban world of Las Vegas that existed beyond the Hotel Canopus. By this I do not mean the famous casinos and nightclubs, though to satisfy my curiosity about them, Samax himself had taken me on a tour when I turned thirteen. Years before my time, he had multiplied his fortune repeatedly in those casinos, but he never visited them anymore. As he put it, he still gambled, but with ideas, not money. It was clear that he frowned on the notion of my spending any time in casinos, but he knew the best antidote to my curiosity was simple exposure. With his connections, I was permitted entry to the gaming rooms, despite my age. So I saw close-up the blackjack and crap tables, touched the gleaming levers of slot machines and the chips at the roulette wheels, all the while studying the faces of the gamblers and gazing hard at the scantily costumed hostesses, miniskirted prostitutes, barroom cowboys, and hangers-on who populated the Strip. Samax gave me a total immersion course and got the results he wanted: within a week, my fascination turned to boredom, and as we were leaving the Tropicana I told him I had seen enough for the time being, could we do something else. The next night he had me assist him in the greenhouse, cleaning the leaves of the persimmons and azarole trees with sponges dipped in watered-down goat’s milk, and I couldn’t have been happier.

The part of Las Vegas Calzas showed me was not one that the planeloads of tourists came in to see. Though I had spent most of my childhood with Luna and Milo in the world of cheap motels, furnished flats, and fast-food drive-ins, I had always had a roof over my head—even if it was just a car roof on the occasions when, pulling into a new city late at night, we had to sleep in a parking lot. In Brooklyn, living in a poor, blue-collar neighborhood that abutted even poorer ones, I had seen my share of down-at-heels and brokenhearted people. But in Las Vegas Calzas took me to two places utterly outside the range of my experience: a homeless shelter run by a group of Navajo Indians, where a nurse he dated on occasion served as a volunteer; and a halfway house for ex-convicts that on Sundays also operated a soup kitchen for the poor. Though I could see that he had given a good deal of the little free time he had at these places, Calzas did not moralize to me about it. Just as when we set out on one of our camping expeditions, he told me nothing of what to expect, preferring to let the experience speak for itself. “Action is the thing,” he once said to me—about as close to a philosophical credo as I ever heard from him. But even as a boy I knew well that charity was an area in which not everybody cared to act. Because of his hardscrabble roots, growing up on a reservation, Calzas’s motivations were not difficult to intuit; Samax’s, on the other hand, were still unclear to me at that time. Though I knew that he too had seen his share of hard times, and been tremendously generous to a lot of people, I was still surprised to learn that he had founded the halfway house just after the Second World War and remained its sole benefactor.

He had named it Asterion House, and I came to know it well, visiting with Calzas at least two Sundays each month to help out in the kitchen, spooning out vegetable stew and mashed potatoes to the men and women who lined up at the door at first light and helping to clean up afterward. I grew close to several of the residents, including a one-time car thief named Claude Tsing, a Taiwanese refugee who had learned his trade while living in Macao. Tsing was a thin man about forty years old with a shaved head and a goatee. He wore thick eyeglasses, V-necked sweaters, and high-top sneakers. According to the police, he had stolen more than two hundred automobiles in a single year in California and Nevada alone, constantly crossing the border to elude capture. After serving an eight-year stretch at the Marbella
State Prison near Carson City, he moved into Asterion House and started training to be an electrician.

“It’s a natural,” he told me, stirring lemonade mix into a six-gallon tub of water. “With my eyes shut, in the dark, in less than twenty seconds, I can cross a car’s transmission wires—any make of car, any year. Within a minute I’m driving away. Wiring somebody’s house is a piece of cake in comparison.”

When I first visited Asterion House, it was managed by an elderly man named Acamar. But a year later he died of internal hemorrhaging after falling from a ladder, and Claude Tsing, despite his expectations of becoming an electrician, was given the manager’s job by Samax. He turned out to be very good at it, and with May Ting, his mail-order bride from Taipei, he ran the halfway house for many years. Though I was Samax’s nephew, they took my visits in stride, treating me like all the other volunteers who regularly showed up. Whenever I did visit, I kept my mouth shut and my eyes open.

If the Hotel Canopus was a house of dreamers, I thought, Asterion House was a scrapyard for those whose dreams had been busted. While the hotel provided a gateway to the strange and the wondrous, the shelter was the place you might hope to land after plunging through some trapdoor of failure or bad luck and finding that your worldly goods could be contained by a satchel, shopping bag, or the thin pockets of a hockshop overcoat. Standing behind the long table with its steaming vats in the shelter’s basement, I would study the faces of those who silently filed in from the street, their straight-ahead eyes and cracked lips, their often swollen hands and wine-colored skin. I returned their smiles when they smiled, but more often lowered my own eyes when I saw they weren’t going to look at me, heaping their plates as high as I could and looking to Calzas beside me when someone in a particularly dire state shuffled by. During my earliest visits, I saw the shelter as the hotel’s dark mirror image, a kind of cautionary alternative reality.

Sensing this, perhaps, Calzas remarked to me one day as we drove home, “From here to the hotel isn’t all that far, Enzo. On this earth, no one place, and no condition of life, is very far from any other. There is a Zuni saying, that the distance between the living and the dead is thinner than a strand of hair.”

Around this time Calzas told me that Azu, Yal, and much of the hotel’s kitchen staff were also ex-cons. Samax had a soft spot in this area, and if Dolores had not insisted otherwise, every worker at the hotel might have been a parolee or other graduate of the penal system.

It was Calzas who, when he wasn’t busy reinforcing my social conscience, also saw to my athletic pursuits. Our trips into the vast wilds of desert and mountain around Las Vegas are among my most cherished memories. In a household humming with intellectual activity, and crowded with some exclusively mental personalities, Calzas was the sole natural athlete with a powerful connection to his physical self. No slouch in other areas—from his esoteric sensibility as an architect to his fine eye for antiquities as Samax’s trusted agent—he seemed constitutionally unable to remain sedentary very long. And so it naturally fell to him, a man nearly forty years Samax’s junior, to teach me the fine art of archery, the essentials of rock climbing, and a half dozen swimming strokes. For hours at a time we would also play catch with a baseball and hit one another high flies or kick a soccer ball around on the hotel’s enormous lawn. Milo had been woefully unathletic, and considered sports a waste of time—though he was a consummate time-waster and procrastinator himself—so Calzas’s athleticism was that much more significant for me. Undergoing a steady bombardment of intellectual stimuli, I needed plenty of physical activity to keep myself in balance. Not to mention the fact that I was an athletic kid myself, with energy to burn, exhilarated by competition and sheer exertion. Early on, I came to seek Calzas’s approval as much as I sought Samax’s. And though a man of few words, Calzas was unstinting in his encouragement of me.

I realized just how much he cared about me when, on my eleventh birthday, he made me a present of Sirius. The bond we formed at that time is one that was never broken. Sirius was a mixed breed, part German shepherd, part Labrador, and a small part wolf, according to Calzas. Jet black, with small white markings on his muzzle and underbelly, Sirius had pale gray irises with white striations, unusual for a dog with his coloring. He was a stray whom Calzas had found in New Mexico on the tortuous foot trail that wound up the steep mesa to the ancient sky-city of Acoma. Acoma was one of the seven desert cities of the Zuni Indians, not far from Mesita, where Calzas himself had been
born. Calzas told me that though Sirius was nearly starved and dehydrated, he was also alert, and had barked at him from atop the pyramid of rocks where he was lying on his side.

“No way he could have climbed up there, even if he wasn’t so weak,” Calzas had said to me, shaking his head. “It was as if he had dropped from the sky.”

When I asked him how he knew Sirius was part wolf, he said, “That’s easy. He never comes to us in a straight line when he’s called. That’s the wolf in him. It’s nothing to be scared of. There’s a poem that says, ‘A wolf is a dog without a master.’ ”

And, it was true, as a puppy and then a grown dog Sirius had never followed a straight line to me when I summoned him. In my room at night he slept on a black mat by the southwest window, and often when I awoke I found him sitting very still beneath the telescope gazing out at the sky over the desert. We often walked into the desert together, and from the very first, no matter what he was doing at the time, Sirius always ran back to sit beside me and watch the sun set. With his calm intelligent eyes, he sought out the moon and the stars at nightfall. Rather than bay at the moon, he seemed to study it, though he barked at meteor showers, eclipses, and the occasional comet we witnessed.

Calzas had surprised me with Sirius the first time we went camping together. It was the first of many such trips into the desert or the mountains in which Calzas instructed me on how to live in the wilderness. First I learned to identify plants and animals, to read weather conditions, and to travel with or without a compass. Then he taught me how to extract water, not only from cacti, but also, with a blunt knife, from the fissures in cave walls where moss was visible; how to sleep in the rain with only a poncho and remain absolutely dry; and how to start a fire, not with two sticks (as in cowboy movies), but with a piece of string or a shoelace. This was a whole new world for me, infinitely fascinating, though I wasn’t sure when in my later life I might be called on to walk ten miles in the Mojave carrying a thirty-pound backpack without taking a sip of water, or to sleep perched on a rock ledge as I did with Calzas in a canyon of the Painted Desert. But, then, I learned a great many things from various people at the Hotel Canopus which at the time seemed unrelated to what I imagined—however vaguely—my life might become.

On that first camping trip, we were heading for the Eldorado
Mountains, southeast of Las Vegas. We had put on thick-soled hiking boots and canvas jackets and wide-brimmed hats that would shield us from blinding sunlight in the stark white canyons. It was dawn, still cool, and the eastern sky was shot through with pink and orange flames. I came out to Calzas’s jeep, and there among the provisions packed neatly in the back was a flat, handwoven basket in which a puppy was curled up on a red blanket. Over breakfast, Calzas had been quiet as usual, even poker-faced, but now he was smiling broadly as I vaulted into the jeep and took the puppy up in my arms. He put both paws on my left shoulder and rested his head against my own, breathing warmly onto my neck.

“His name is Sirius,” Calzas said. “And he’s all yours now.”

That night in the mountains, after the three of us had eaten by the fire under a half-moon, Sirius curled up inside the crook of my arm in my small tent, his fur sweet-smelling and soft, just as he would curl up in my bed at the hotel for the next few months, until he got too big and started sleeping on his mat.

Because I was not only privately tutored, but was the only child at the Hotel Canopus, Samax had the good sense to ensure that I had the opportunity, if I wanted it, to play with other boys. I played second base for a Little League team—but only for a single season. And I had the chance to play games and roughhouse with various boys whom Samax brought out to the hotel as my guests, to sleep over or spend the day. Invariably these playmates were the sons and grandsons of people with whom Samax had business or civic connections. I didn’t become close friends with any of them, but then, even in Brooklyn I had lots of acquaintances but no best friend. And I confirmed what I had intuited there: I wasn’t the Little League type. My teammates thought me a good fielder and base stealer, a player who, while not unfriendly, very much kept to himself. In fact, among other children I was as shy as I was outgoing in the company of adults. That’s just the way I was after my years with Luna and Milo.

Needless to say, after school-hopping for a couple of years with them, and attending a public elementary school in Brooklyn, this flood of learning could have been overwhelming had it not been informed by Samax’s eclectic curiosity and the general passion for knowledge around the hotel. In a place where nine in ten residents were engaged
in idiosyncratic, often mystical, research projects, the intensity of my own education soon felt perfectly natural. And I never for a moment missed attending a conventional school. In Brooklyn I had chafed at the necessity of sitting rigidly in a classroom with forty other children under the thumb of an overtaxed and uninspiring teacher. True, with my grandmother I had come to enjoy the security of living in one place, but now I relished the more electric environment of the hotel, with its exciting through-traffic; while remaining happily stationary, I could enjoy a variation on the pleasures of the road—as in silent movies where scenery revolves rapidly behind firmly rooted pedestrians who appear to be in motion. In this respect, I realized, I was a lot like Samax, who joked that when the time came for him to settle down, he could only do it in a hotel, among transients. And so it was—perhaps genetically—that I seemed naturally inclined to the way of life he had constructed at the Hotel Canopus.

I also still had a lot of free time in this new life, and in addition to roaming the desert, cycling, and generally idling in the many nooks and crannies available to me, I did a lot of reading on my own from the books of exploration and fable with which Samax had stocked my bookshelves. While the various libraries boasted forty thousand volumes, there was only a single television set in the hotel, in the downstairs lounge. Except for the game-of-the-week during baseball season, television barely interested me, and few of the adults around me ever watched it. There was a small projection theater where Samax had the latest movies played on Friday nights, and I usually took a front-row seat for these. But by my thirteenth birthday, I had become a devoted bookworm, and the sum effect of all this intellectual activity was that years later, when I arrived at college and discovered what was expected of me, I was so well prepared that I felt at times as if I had been through it all before—and then some.