News from the Plains: All this RED can make you BLUE
Smuggling my son into The Bahamas
by Barry Friedman
(No politics today)
-April, 2008
I smuggled my son into The Bahamas last month in a prescription bottle.
But more about that in a moment.
He told his mother that when he died, he wanted a Viking funeral, wanted to be put on a burning boat and sent out to sea, while his friends and family shot flaming arrows overhead.
Anything else we can do for you?
My daughter, Nina, told me her brother's best memories were in The Bahamas. I've been working there as a comedian for twenty years and, on a few occasions when they were younger, they'd come with me. We'd stay in a villa on Paradise Island and he would meet girls with braided hair and make out with them in the hotel lobby and charge virgin daiquiris to the room--at least he told me they were virgin.
Paul was 24 when he died, but you should have seen him before then, should have seen him here, back before the drugs got too easy and life got too hard, back when his smile was broad and his eyes were bright--but maybe every father thinks that about his son--and he'd sit on a tall lifeguard chair till the early morning and just stare at the ocean.
(Drugs change a son's face. I have those pictures, too.)
So, it was settled. Nina and I would sprinkle his ashes in the Atlantic.
Maybe the Vikings could pick him up later.
You can research a country’s laws on transporting ashes, on the best way to bring your dead son into the Caribbean, but some things you can't bring yourself to Google; so along with my ex-wife and Nina, I scooped out some of Paul's ashes from the box we got from the funeral home and transferred them to a green tea tin container, which I put in my suitcase. I was going back to the Atlantis to do comedy, the first trip back since his death, the first trip really anywhere. Worried that the container might set off the metal detectors at the security checkpoints of two countries, I transferred them again ... this time to a large Tylenol 3 prescription bottle, removed the label, and put it—him—in my toiletry bag.
I’m sorry, but this is how you get your son’s ashes out of the country.
In the process, I spilled Paul on the counter; I ran my fingertips over him. I tried to collect as much of him as I could in my palm, tried to rub him in to my hands.
It's what fathers do.
For all the pre-planning, immigration in neither country was a problem. My bags were never even opened.
I could have brought the tin.
When the night came, Richard, my friend down here and owner of the club, Nina, and her friend Sarah, who came with us, and I walked to the beach outside a place called the Jungle Bar. We said as much of the Mourner's Kaddish as we knew (which was not much), and then sprinkled Paul in the ocean, which took him out with a vengeance.
And that was it.
The night before, though, the gate to the beach from the bar was locked, so we went to Nassau instead, taking Paul with us. Nina put him in her purse. First to Flamingos for mojitos, then to Senor Frog’s for shots, then to Bamboo for beers, then some place for chicken wings.
On the way back to the car, along Woodes Rogers Walk, a street which runs parallel to the ocean, I asked Nina, "Do you have your brother?”
“Yeah, I think,” she said, looking in her purse for the prescription bottle.
He was there.
But for a moment, she thought, we thought, she had left him somewhere at one of the bars--a bar in a foreign country, surrounded by drunk girls off of cruise ships on Spring Break.
We figured he would have liked that--preferred it, actually, to the Vikings and the burning ship.
P.S. Today is Paul's birthday. He would have been 30. He would have been good it. But maybe that's just what fathers of dead boys tell themselves.
