How Do You Solve a Problem Like Montalvo?

“It’s like walking into a sit-com,” said Gaby, who both works and frequents The Poet’s Passage, where I write. “All the familiar characters are there. Marc is writing, Johann is reading or napping, Carlos is being a pirate. It’s wonderfully normal and predictable.”

That could be true. For example, a gentleman in white tights, white face, and a red nose has just greeted me—silently—by offering his hand and then posing in still life for several seconds. So if you’re a clown, or a writer, or a pirate—well, where else do you go?

Which may have been why it wasn’t surprising, somehow, when Lady, the owner of the café, told me the news, “Montalvo’s in jail.”

“What,” I said, “what did he do?”

“He stole a parrot!”

“Yeah, from the parrot guy, who works down by the cruise ships, when they come in. You know, he has five or six parrots, and he charges twenty bucks for a picture of the parrots resting on your arms and shoulders. Good business….”

“Montalvo stole one of that guy’s parrots?!”

“Yeah, and then he went running into La Perla, where he lives, and the cops were chasing after him, and now he’s in prison in Bayamón….” 

“Wow—didn’t think the police went into La Perla…”

“Well, they usually don’t,” said Lady, “but they did for Montalvo!”

My friend Sonia once described La Perla as a modern medieval city; medieval because it sprang up without planning between the walls of Old San Juan and the sea. It’s a hodgepodge of streets, alleys, walkways and once ramshackle wood houses that sheltered the poor but honest people who worked in Old San Juan. Now? Well, it’s rumored to be a haven for drug dealers. The only time the police go into La Perla, in general, is when they can do it essentially as the Army went into Iraq: shock and awe.

“So what are we going to do about Montalvo,” I asked Lady.

“His mother called me—and she doesn’t want me to bail him out. He’s 21 years old, and she wants him to learn his lesson. So she told me—no bail.”

Montalvo, you see, has worked for the café seven times, and has also been fired from the café seven times. At the time of his arrest, he was in the fired phase, and thus had no money.

“So why did he steal the parrot,” I asked.

“It was his mother’s birthday, and he didn’t have anything to give her!”

“So he stole the parrot!”

“Well, for his mother….” said Lady defensively, and then she started to laugh.

“I just have this picture of Montalvo running like crazy with the parrot on his shoulder, and the cops with their billy-clubs chasing after him, like the Keystone Cops….”

OK—so his mother didn’t want him out on bail. The plan then became to visit on Saturday, possibly with a cake with a metal file in it.

That was until yesterday.

“Eight whole fucking days, and not one fucking person called to find out how I was! I was in there over a fucking week, and who calls? So today, I call all the missed calls, and guess what? They all wanted something—not one of them was calling about me! So fuck all of them!”

He’s angry, and also buzz-cut—prison apparently takes after the army that way. We talk him down.

“Well, I was high, up to my tits,” he said. “And the thing was, the parrot came to me! I mean, the guy was texting or screwing around with his phone—he wasn’t even paying attention to his birds! And then the parrot jumped on my lap! So there I am, patting this bird and really getting into him and he’s looking at me with these intense eyes, and the next thing I know, I’m walking—fucking WALKING, not running—away with the bird. I mean, I even stopped and took selfies of me and the bird! I mean, look.”

He handed over the phone….

“It’s sort of a twist on the Monty Python routine,” I said.  “’I ain’t stealing the parrot, it was restin’ on my shoulder….’”

We passed the phone around.

“The bird looks great,” I said, “but Jesus, Montalvo, you look stoned!”

“…to my tits,” he repeated.

“And what kind of bird was it,” I said. “Gorgeous color….”

“That’s the thing,” said Montalvo, “of all the fucking birds, I had to go steal the most expensive one: a Blue Macaw. I mean, there are like 3,000 of them in the entire world, and there’s a list of everyone who owns one. So what the hell was I going to do with a Blue Macaw in La Perla? I didn’t have a cage, I didn’t have anything to feed it, I didn’t have any money to buy it food….”

“Champagne taste,” I told him.

“So how much was the bird worth,” I asked.

“That’s the thing—I had to go steal a 25,000 dollar bird!”

“What!”

“Yeah, 25,000 fucking dollars.

“Yeah, the cops were telling me ‘if you had stolen one of the $500 dollar birds, your bail would have been a lot less’ and they were right,’ he said. And went on to say, “you know, I’m really glad they arrested me, because if not, the dealers in La Perla would have killed me and fed me to the sharks….”

Justice outside the walls of the city is a little different.

“Do you have any experience representing parrot rustlers,” I asked Kayla. Because, guess what? It’s four PM, and Montalvo has his preliminary hearing in court at 8:30 the next morning. And Montalvo, with the twelve dollars in his pocket?

Right—it’s now Adventures in Paternity, or Fatherhood 101, or maybe a sort of alternative to the old TV show, “This Is Your Life”—all the people who weren’t in your life. Because I’m now feeling quite father-like.

“He’s a basically good kid,” I told Kayla, who’s a lawyer. “So I haven’t told him what my father told my brother….”

“What was that,” she said.

“Montalvo, you are going to HAVE to be honest, because you are too goddamned STUPID to be a criminal!”

“Did he wince,” said Kayla.

“Well, he looked down at the floor,” I told her. “So I guess that’s a wince.”

Guess what? Lawyers drink coffee, which is really good news, since Lady looked up and realized with a start: that wasn’t a customer, that was the cavalry coming over the hill.

The moment comes.

“How are we doing this,” I ask her. The lawyer has been getting Montalvo’s side of the story. But there’s a problem—he’s not a criminal lawyer, and he’s not sure that he’s up to the job. So he wants to consult his partner—who is a criminal lawyer.

“Half and half,” said Lady. “That’s how we always do it, right?”

Who knows how much it’ll be, but what are we going to do? The judge told him, the day she set bail, that if convicted, Montalvo could face eight years in jail.

“I’m gonna go out and find that parrot guy,” said Lady. “What if he dropped the charges? We’ll tell him that Montalvo’s the future national poet of Puerto Rico, he’s 21, he was stoned.”

“Up to my tits,” said Montalvo, who apparently likes the phrase.

“I’d go with an animal activist defense,” said Jessica, who had drifted by, kissed Montalvo, rubbed his buzz cut. “The bird was clearly abused and was attracted to Montalvo’s energy.”

“He was probably attracted to Montalvo’s dope fumes,” I said, “since we now know that Montalvo…”

“Up to…”

I cut him off.

“Do you have a tie?” I asked Montalvo. It’s now several hours later, and it occurred to me—what was he going to wear to court? So there Montalvo was, in my apartment, rummaging for shoes to wear.

“Too bad the shoes aren’t black,” I told him. “Otherwise, with the white shirt, black pants, and a tie, you make a perfect Mormon missionary!”

So we tied his tie for him, loosened it, and sent him on his way. I tell Raf that Montalvo is one stupid kid, but what could I do?

“Look at it this way,” he said, “at least you never had to change his diaper….”