BITTERSWEET LEGEND OF MACEDONIO

I was in New York when the story was percolating and I went searching for the  Macedonio Obledo. After living with one stable, loving man, and knowing enough men to distinguish the characters from the counterfeits, I realized how singular Mace lived. I wanted to know his story. I searched the Internet and discovered a Macedonio Obledo in Florida. I wrote him a letter, circumventing the possibility of a hang up or bad news.

The last time I’d seen Mace, he was sitting across from me, drawing a picture of the exotic life we’d lived together in Florida. He showed up in an older Cornice Rolls Royce dressed in a dark blue pin-stripped suit and tie. He was a lot like the early criminally chic Jean Paul Belmondo of the French new wave films.

It was twenty years since we’d love nested in Marin county.   I sat very still while Mace served me lunch and talked euphorically about Boca Raton. He was magnificently persuasive as he outlined his love for me and the destiny we would share. We would travel to Argentina, ride horses across the Pampa, and dance the tango. There was an immediacy in his gestures, as if he was being chased, that overlapped his ruminations of life at age 52. His hair was still blue black and closely framed his forehead. His bronzed skin stretched tight across his Indian cheekbones, and his farcical humor punctuated each sentence. He possessed an ethereal view of life that nullified the effects of aging. He tempered his Latin sensuality with Greek philosophy.

It was not easy to let Mace go, because I never stopped loving him. I was not considering his proposal, but I wasn’t ready to let him go either. He waited several weeks for me to make up my mind.

For the past nine years, Mace had lived a few miles away. Once we were reunited speeding on the freeway; and exchanged phone numbers at the next exit. That was the kind of serendipity in our history. I could not seem to move without Mace rising in the background with a force majeure to undermine whatever I happened to be doing—with whomever. He defied the laws of my father years ago, when he asked for an introduction into the Mob!

Mace left without me in early 1993. Eight years passed before I went looking for him. My life piloted me in different directions until two years ago. I began searching again. This time the Internet showed Mace living on San Marcos Island. Throughout our history, Mace had skinned off clippings of his adolescence. His abbreviated childhood began in Chicago. His mother died while they were on a plane. His father was wealthy and mean. Mace served in the Korean War. He later moved to Los Angeles, and married a wealthy Swedish woman. He ran with a fast crowd, and hung around Brentwood.

What he did not reveal was his interior self: the origin of his philosophy, his parent’s ancestry, and what trials of life he’d suffered. What fire burned at his heels? Why did he want to marry a woman with a distinctive background, and where’d he get the nerve to ask my father for an introduction into the Mafia? How can you write about such a character without knowing the entire story?

This year I went searching again. The Internet had him living in Ft. Lauderdale. No address or phone number. I remembered what he’d said, “Just think about me and I’ll know, and come find you.” I wrote a three part series in my column about him. Still, no sign of Macedonio.

Two weeks ago, I tried another search. This time his name came up in a puzzling excerpt on a church website. I emailed the Minister. A few days later, I received a note from his sister. I don’t have to tell you what it said.

Mace lived the rest of his life in Costa Rica. I imagine him living in a tropical villa with a beautiful woman. He is dressed in white tennis shorts, and spends his days surfing, riding horses, and dancing the tango.