Note to Naïa's Uncles

“Nico told me I should send your blog to Naïa’s uncles,” said Lady, the owner of the café and mother of 12-year old Naïa. “They think I am ruining her….”

“Why,” I asked, ”she seems perfectly fine to me.”

“Well, they say I’m doing a terrible thing by home-schooling her. They say that she needs contact with other kids, and that she won’t get socialized, and I don’t know what all. Anyway, I’m a terrible mother.”

“Naïa’s more normal than I am,” I say. “At least on the face of it. I think kids are tremendous conformists, most of them. Remember that time I spilled something, and we had that argument about the “wet caution floor” sign?”

“Hunh?”

“Maybe you were off painting houses,” I said.

Yes, Lady is also a house painter, but a sensible woman as well. So why get outside and climb ladders in the blazing tropical heat when you can sit at the bar, drink a beer, chat with passersby, and paint little decorative plaster casitas? Lady does good business selling these for sixty bucks or so—given the obvious advantages, you’ve got to be seriously dumb to do the other kind.

“Anyway, I spilled some water, and it was a big thing at Wal-Mart: everyone, even the English teacher, knew that if you spilled water, one person had to stay at the site and warn people, the other person had to get the “wet caution floor” sign.”

“Wet caution floor?”

“What is this, genetic? Or is it a girl thing? Haven’t you ever read your own sign?’

Of course I have to go get the sign—why can’t I back away from a fight?—and we take a look at it. You’ve seen it a zillion times, of course, and if I had Internet—it’s Sunday, so the damn thing is taking the day off—I’d show you a picture of it. But there it was, the yellow collapsible thing that says:

Wet

Caution

Floor

“Caution, wet floor,” says Lady.

Right, Marc is now in complete fight or flight, because guess what? I know the argument, which is that the “caution,” being bigger, means that it goes first. It’s sort of the bully argument.

“Caution, wet floor,” repeats Lady, and you know what? I decide to drop it….

“Anyway, I think Naïa has great social skills,” I say. “Every time someone comes to talk to Neruda, she runs over and gives them an in-service on the bird. Complete strangers, and she’s chatting away. I was seven before I worked up the courage to address my own mother….”

Neruda, at least in the Poet’s Passage, is the green Dominican parrot who, having nothing else to do, squawks at any passerby.

“Yeah?”

“Well, not really, but I was really shy. The point being that Naïa talks to anyone, but she’s also pretty savvy.”

“Well, Nico wants to put her in the Episcopal Cathedral School…”

“WHAT?!”

I see these kids on the bus, and they’re all wearing a little blue uniforms and black Mary Jane shoes. Naïa wearing flowing blouses, pants, and Crocs. If it were the sixties, you’d find her on Haight-Ashbury. The Episcopal Cathedral School is definitely Junior League. 

“Well, she’d get a good traditional education,” says Lady.

“To my mind, she’s already getting a good, traditional education. I’m amazed, really, that nothing seems to have changed in the half-century since I was in school. You know, she has spelling tests—of which I approve, generally—but I really wonder about that. Short of writing thank-you notes to Michelle Obama for a lovely dinner, is she ever going to need traditional spelling? Spell check has done away with that, in a sense.”

“So what would you do?”

“Put a lot more attention on those words like “their / there / they’re” or “adapt / adopt”—words that have to be used correctly, and can’t be detected by spell check. Anyway, it’s incredible, some of the stuff she has to learn.”

“Like what?”

“’Lebanon is a country roughly the size of New Jersey’,” I recite.

“Hunh?”

“It’s one of the sentences I heard her tutor read her, and I thought it was one of the dumbest things I had ever heard.”

“Why?”

“Look, has she ever been to New Jersey? How many kids are reading that sentence and memorizing it, so that they can answer the question: ‘What is the approximate size of Lebanon?’ on the test. Anyway, why don’t they teach her the real dope on Lebanon?”

“And that is?”

“Lebanon was a paradise for centuries, a paradise that is part of the region called the Levant. And it was famous for its civilization, for tolerating all religions, all views, for accepting Jews, Christians, Muslims equally. People walked around, arm in arm, ideological enemies cordially having passionate discourse on the most violence-producing topics, and eating dates!”

“Yeah?” says Lady, who has a good nose for when I go a little off.

“OK, but you know what I mean.”

“So what happened?”

“Exactly.”

“What?”

“You know, that’s exactly the question I would ask Naïa. How, in a remarkably short time, did the country fall into a terrible civil war? What happened? Then I’d go off and write something and she’d research it and come back tell me. But telling Naïa that Lebanon is the size….”

“Hey, why don’t you tutor Naïa?”

“Wouldn’t work,” I said. “First, I’m not good with kids. Second, well, Naïa takes school with all the seriousness it deserves. She wants to be told the approximate size of Lebanon, because it’s perfectly easy to park that fact in her mind just long enough to drive it out onto the test. Remember her answer when I asked her the state capital of Oregon?”

“What?”

“That was last year!”

It’s not just the Levant, I think. How fragile all societies are! How changing one thing would change everything—what if Jorge were not making the coffee and Neruda were not squawking and Lorca, the toy Chihuahua, were not begging for food? Could we have the Poet’s Passage without Naïa, flopped on her tummy, absorbing the fact of the approximate size of Lebanon?

She ain’t going anywhere!

Introduction to my Next Book

It started when I came home from England, where I was cold, and got back to Puerto Rico, where it was hot. And then, they decided on a particularly extreme form of torture: repaving the street. This involved ripping up the asphalt, igniting generators, shouting, dropping chunks of pavement into trucks, more shouting, more generators, more asphalt…you get the picture.

What was the result? Well, we now have a bricked road, vaguely reminiscent of the famous blue adoquines that pave the rest of the old city. When the street was finished, I breathed a sigh of relief, and concluded that the affair was over, that there were no new ways to confound my life.

Ah, innocence!

I hadn’t noticed, you see, that while the street was done, the corner was not—so that meant that that had to be ripped up, that the asphalt had to be dropped, the generators ignited, the greetings shouted. Oh, and there’s a problem—funny how often there is, somebody should really look into it—because while we are nearing completion of the corner to my right, the corner to my left? It still has that dreadful asphalt.

We do many things well in Puerto Rico, but silence? We shatter it, we slaughter it, we massacre it. An example: Puerto Rican children are routinely taken to Old San Juan, to see the adoquines, to look at the colonial architecture, and to scream slogans, such as “Yo soy boricua, ¡pa’ que tú lo sepas!” (Roughly, “I’m Puerto Rican, so that you know it!?”)

This is done at the urging of their teachers.

OK—it was hot, it was loud, and how could I write? I was driven to find an alternative, a place where they would feed me, know my name, and let me watch the characters come and go. There is, for example, Elizabeth, who is mopping the floor of the gift shop she minds on the other side of the café, and whose two children drift in from school around three PM and sleep on the couches or play video games. Then there’s Naïa, who…well, why not check in with her?

“Naïa, are your dragons behaving themselves?”

“Yes,” she replies, from around the corner, where she is sitting making a virtual zoo, which, at the moment, is animal-less.

“All except Screaming Death….”

“So what did he do,” I ask.

“Almost ate a baby dragon…”

She then goes on to show me the dragon that is currently accompanying her, as she munches on pretzel sticks. Called “Toothless,” after a character in How toTrain Your Dragon—“it’s a really good movie,” reports Naïa,—it in fact does have teeth. But the coolest thing is that it also opens its mouth and ejects smoke. 

People can’t do it—at least in the café—but the dragon can. Is that fair? I point this out to Naïa, who gives me a disgusted look.

Well, not really—we move past disgust and into is-he-being-stupid-again, the answer to which is so often “yes.” She returns to the infinitely more interesting world of the virtual zoo.

There’s a woman—probably homeless—who is snoozing in a chair in the gift shop’s open-mic area next door. Why do I think she’s homeless? Well, do you walk around with a backpack stuffed with clothes?

There’s Jorge, the manager of the café, of whom I keep waiting to see: will he ever lose his cool? In the year plus that I’ve been here, he never has. I did get the report, though, that he’s capable of it, since the café, during the mayhem that is the San Sebastián Street Festival, was the object of a dog-knapping. Yup, somebody stole the toy Chihuahua, Lorca, and it was only via the intervention of a customer who spotted Lorca, grabbed him, and brought him back, that we have Lorca today.

“And can you believe the dog-knappers had the gall to insist that Lorca was their dog! That’s when Jorge flew into a fit, and cursed the people in both English and Spanish. He nearly got into a fist fight….”

So reported Lady, the prevailing muse of the place. She comes in and the kissing begins, since she knows everyone and if she doesn’t she soon will, so why not start out on the right foot and give a stranger a kiss? Because of this, she enjoys robust good health, having fortified her immune system by night and day mingling with the microbial world. So she never gets sick, and everybody is her friend.

“I don’t have a college degree, but I have the Poet’s Passage,” she reports. In her early forties, she’s a poet, though she’s decided that seven is enough: she’s not doing any more. She married a Frenchman, who came over to do a project for his MBA program, and who stayed to fall in love, marry, and paint. That, for a Frenchman, seems more fitting than an MBA program.

“In the early days, we were so poor that we were eating—sharing, actually—a can of Chef Boyardee spaghetti and meatballs,” she once told me. Surprising, Naïa was born with no genetic abnormalities, unless preferring dragons to Barbie counts as one.

“And when we were looking to buy the building, I gathered all the facts and went down to the bank. And there were all these men in suits, and there was me—a poet, answering all their questions. There’s money in poetry….”

Well, the bank went bust a couple years ago (not quite that dramatically—at the insistence of the FDIC, it was “bought” by another bank, but the whole thing fooled nobody). But the Poet’s Passage? Still here!

“Sunshine, what would happen if I stole a cookie?” I ask. Yes, his name is Sunshine—why shouldn’t it be? Do we all have to be Toms and Bills?—and yes, he agreed to look the other way.

It was better as a kid, or maybe it was better when it was more illicit….

“Are you going to play today?” asks Omar. Probably I will, since at about five every day, I start thinking about scotch, which I’m trying not to do. So playing Bach Suites on the cello is a nice alternative. What I need to do now is start playing later and later. I might have a chance at sobriety at last. People come by and throw money in my cello case, and I donate it to four charities in the Third World.

And in the year or so that I’ve worked here, well…what have I created? A blog with 585 posts and over 43,000 page-views.

That’s a year’s work? Shouldn’t I have written the great American novel, or a scholarly treatise on the enriching effect of the Caribbean literary tradition on mainstream American literature? What’s a blog?

The electronic version of a newspaper, and where’s yesterday’s newspaper? Very likely in a corner, under your new puppy….

So I looked back. Was there anything there? Could I put the best of what I had written into a book? Something I could hold, and maybe—wow!—sell. The New York Times, of course, would rave—a major literary voice has been found!—and I would have stalkers, all of whom, of course, I would ignore.

(Time out for an interruption. Sunshine has just informed me that El Barco de Vapor—the Steam Boat—is giving 12,000 bucks to anyone who wins the first prize in the children’s book competition. I instantly remember Naïa.

“Hey, can I use your dragon to power a steam boat?”

“Marc, it’s a toy dragon….”

Ohhhh….)

Now where was I?

Oh yes, a book, which will give me something to do (besides honest work). But is there anything there?

You decide….

On Sisters and Ticks

OK, Dear Readers, we have a serious problem, since what happens to a blogger without Internet? The same thing that happens to surgeons without scalpels…

Right, the son of a newspaperman am I, so, was I going to be defeated by what never existed until the last years of my father’s life? Shouldn’t I be able to find something, anything, to write about?

He would have been 105, three days before that day (Wednesday,) and he died nearly twenty years ago, but here’s today’s secret, Dear Readers: it gets better, yes, but never to the point of best. Which means that, yes, I no longer weep when I see a wok (Jack was an excellent Chinese cook), and I’m glad that he got out of the world as he did: fast and painless, with not too much deterioration. Life makes you philosophical, and the icon giving the option to go on indefinitely can’t be found on the desktop. So you might as well go when you still have most of your faculties, and life isn’t too onerous. But that said, his absence turns up, once in a while, and then I miss him.

Wednesday, for example, he showed up at The Poet’s Passage, the café / craft shop where I work, and where the Internet had decided to take a prolonged cigarette break. I was delivering rice and beans to Naïa, the daughter of the owner, whom I had seen and who was going off to get her child the rice and beans. Since I myself was going for rice and beans, it was no problem to get an extra order.

Naïa, of course, is completely unfazed by Marc arriving with the food instead of her mother. And also completely in character, she has a joke:

“What do you call a mad flea?”

I know it’s going to be bad.

“OK—tell me.”

“A lunatic!”

I’m about to protest that a tick is hardly a flea, but guess what? The damage is done, and Naïa is a girl who has never once ventured down the doll aisle of a toy store. Instead, she heads straight for insects—in which I believe—or dinosaurs—in which I don’t. So that means that not only is she twelve, but she’ll probably win.

“How can you not believe in dinosaurs,” she said, when I presented my belief.

“Never seen one,” I said, and braced myself for the inevitable.

“And have you ever seen a tick, “ I said, hoping to deflect the argument, and she professed that she had—one had been venturing across the inner landscape of Lorca’s ear. (Lorca being the toy Chihuahua…)

So we talked about that, and discussed proper tick-removal schemes: you can’t pull them out if they’re embedded. Then I asked what she had done with the tick.

“Flushed it down the toilet,” she said.

“A singularly uncreative thing to do with a perfectly good tick,” I said.

“Yeah? What would you have done with a tick?”

“In fact, there is a long history of inventive uses of ticks in my family,” I told her, since first it was true, and anyway, there was no Internet.

Eric walks into the café.

“There was my brother Eric, who was engaged to an genteel lady from Pittsburgh: her father was a cardiologist, her mother hung out with the Carnegies and the Mellons. So what happened when Eric found a tick on him, one weekend after having been out in the woods? Well, he went to the jewelry store, got a ring box, deposited the tick on the cotton, and then had them wrap it up. Then he left it on her desk at the Daily Cardinal, the student newspaper where they both worked.”

The marriage ended in divorce.

Naïa, of course, doesn’t see that. Eric definitely picked the wrong girl….

“Then there was my father, who had also been out in the woods, and who had to interview the president of the Bank of Madison.”

Historical note—there was a time, Dear Reader, when banks had perfectly sensible names, before they began to call themselves MadBank, or whatever.

Jack walks into the café.

“Well, the president of the bank was young, and very pompous, and treating Mr. Newhouse with great formality, which generally tended to be wasted on Jack. So the prez left the room, which was a good thing, since Jack had begun to feel that really awful feeling: something strolling across his scalp. So there my father was, holding the tick in his hand. And then he heard footsteps.”

“So what did he do?’ asked Naïa.

“He must had had Mercury blossoming all over his astrological chart,” I told her, “since he knew immediately what to do. He leaned forward and dropped the black tick on a white piece of paper on the president’s desk.”

“Then what happened,” asked Naïa.

“Well, he waited for the situation to evolve. And then he saw the president start, and reach out to grab the paper. But Jack wasn’t having any of that!”

“So what did he do?”

“He leaned forward and said, ‘is that a TICK on your desk?’ So then the president got really nervous and said ‘Oh, I’m terribly sorry, I’m afraid I don’t know!’ He should just have laughed, of course, but he got rattled. So Jack leaned farther forward and said, “well, any damn fool can see that that’s a TICK!” And now, Jack couldn’t help it, and began saying things like, ‘do you mean to tell me your bank has TICKS!’ and ‘have you ever had an infestation of TICKS before?!’ So of course the president got completely rattled.”

“So then what happened,” Naïa wants to know.

“Well, Jack finished the interview and went across the street to have a cup of coffee behind the front window of the diner. And guess what happened, twenty minutes later?”

“What?”

“Three trucks from Oliver Exterminating roared up in from of the bank. And the guys came out running, like HazMat guys going after a bomb!”

Naïa is completely unimpressed. Right, I realize it wasn’t much of a story.

Unless, of course, you had known Jack….

Family is funny, I thought. People come in and out, die, turn up unexpectedly, and go away again. And then, sometimes, people just turn up.

“Marc, I don’t know how to say this,” said Lady, Naïa’s mother.

This is rarely a good sentence to hear.

“You’re one of my closest friends,” she says simply.

“You’re my sister,” I say, without thinking. That’s when you know it’s true.

We kiss. Then I head off to the café.

Naïa has to have her rice and beans.

The Curious Case of the Parrot Rustler, Resolved

Now that it’s over, now that the stress is off, now that justice has been done…but wait, was it?

Readers of this blog know the story—Montalvo, a 21-year old kid whom I barely know but who has made me several hundred dollars of excellent coffee, got it into his head to…wait, I’ll do bullets:

·      Get stoned up to his tits

·      Wander the streets of Old San Juan

·      Interact with a blue macaw, estimated value $15,000

·      Really look into the bird’s eye

·      Feel a magical connection to the bird

·      Magical turns to mystical!

·      Share a destiny with the bird

·      Remember that it’s his mother’s birthday

·      Put the bird on his shoulder

·      Take numerous selfies of himself and the bird

·      Decide to give the bird to his mother

·      Stroll to his apartment in the seaside community of La Perla, where the police arrest him

You may ask, and Montalvo—in his stoned-up-to-his-tits state was probably asking as well—why did the police arrest him? What was the big deal?

There are, it appears, people in this world who bring an unduly fussy approach to the concept of private property. As well, that macaw was a working bird, since its job was, yes, to sit on shoulders, as it obligingly did with Montalvo. Unfortunately, Montalvo, instead of venturing to La Perla, was supposed to smile, get his picture taken, and then pay 20 bucks and take the photo.

There was another problem—the picturesque seaside community of La Perla has a commendable system of local justice: it’s swift, cost-effective and certainly efficient. And for certain offenses, the community….

OK—drop the ironic voice. Two days ago, somebody stumbled on a dead body right in front of La Perla, and I spent several hours worrying that it was Montalvo.

“There was a guy with a tattoo of a number under his right eye—and he spent several hours looking through the window,” said María, who works in the coffee shop where Montalvo had worked and been fired seven times. There’s something about Montalvo—he has second chances as cats do lives.

The guy with the tattoo was replaced by a punk with a mohawk.

The community, you see, was interested in resolving an issue with Montalvo, since he had violated a sacred precept of the group: you don’t bring the police into La Perla.

So that was a problem, since the owner of the café has her 14-year old daughter being home-schooled in the café.

For this act of parrot rustling, Montalvo was sent to prison in a neighboring town, where the first question presented to him was his gang affiliation. The prisons, you see, are segregated by gangs, in this case either the Ñetas or the G27s. And how do all these gentlemen get along? All amicable in the gang world?

To give you an idea—the G27s call the Ñetas gusanos, or worms. The Ñetas call the G27s insectos.

Montalvo, in short, was going to have to declare an affiliation. Nor was that the worst—Montalvo was 21, relatively short, and cute. So what had saved his virginity, those eight days he spent in jail before his mom bailed him out? Well, he’s a vegetarian, and the prison was reliably feeding him meat. So Montalvo gave the meat to his cellmate, who announced to everybody that Montalvo was off limits, guys, Montalvo was his meat, so to speak. So, for eight days it worked, but would it work for eight years?

“Where the hell are his parents,” I said to Lady. Well, the father has been out of the picture for most of a decade. Mom has no money, and not much patience, since this road? It’s not the road less traveled.

There’s a wonderfully descriptive and extremely coarse word —beginning with the letters pendej… in Spanish which means a little pubic hair. Why? Because there are some people who sit around and watch while someone else is having all the fun.

Also, there are some people who pay while someone else has the fun….

“So what are we gonna do,” I ask Lady.

Lady knew a lawyer, who put the matter quite succinctly to Montalvo: you fucked up.

For that he went to law school?

So all was perfectly splendid; Montalvo drifted off to Arecibo, to spend quality time with his grandmother and get away—very incidentally—from the heated air of Old San Juan. During that time, and the day before the trial, we got the tab for the lawyer.

It was not cheap.

Nor was it unreasonable. Because the likelihood that Montalvo could sail into court, get everything settled in one day, and walk out was less than likely. The cops had to show up, and guess what? They worked a night shift the night before, and then they’re gonna go sit in court all day? Nah—so they don’t show up. Or the parrot guy—who, by the way, had been convicted of stealing a parrot himself, or so said the street—he might not show up. Not to mention the judge…. In short, in Puerto Rico we have a plethora of people who might not show up….

It came down to the wire—what were we gonna do? Would we throw Montalvo to the wolves, let him take his chances with a public defender, and live with knowing that Montalvo was getting raped in prison?

Readers, send me congratulations and prayers.

I’m a father.

Damn fool got two years probation.

Just don’t expect cigars.

I’m broke!

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….”