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 the Edge

I can tell you that Lebanon is about the size of New Jersey, that 70% of the population is Moslem, and 30% are Arab Christians. Oh, and that the civil war lasted one and a half decades.

I can tell you this because a man in his fifties is reading from The World and Its People to a 14 year-old girl, who last year was struggling through state capitals. She’s Naia, the daughter of the café where I write, and she’s being home-schooled, which in this case means reading a lot of stuff in the book, and then getting quizzed on it. And so each morning I watch the pair; they seem to get on well.

In fact, the information that a civil war lasted three decades doesn’t quite begin to tell you the real story. That was best done by author Nassim Nicholas Taleb, and it went something like this:

There was once a place where people of all kinds lived in peace: Jews, Christian and Moslem. But religion, though important, wasn’t all-important; being Lebanese was at least as important. And so people lived side by side in prosperity and peace, just as they had for generations, just as they always would.

What happened? I can’t remember and that may have been the point. For Taleb, the civil war illustrated how immensely fragile societies are, and how easily they can be torn apart.

I think about this because of two events taking place or that took place recently. The first was the Fiestas de la Calle San Sebastián, which lasted temporally four days and experientially as long as the civil war in Lebanon.

To say that the affair was boggled is to be polite. First of all, the mayor of the city decided to erect cyclone fences on several of the streets and proposed having checkpoints on the rest. Oh, and everybody—residents included—would have to go through metal detectors, be scanned by wands, and do what-not. To do all this, the mayor contracted a private company, at an undisclosed cost.

This immediately aroused the concern of the ACLU, who argued that the idea, and certainly the practice, violated the fourth amendment. It aroused my concern—I thought we’d have a stampede. So the ACLU met with the mayor and got nowhere. Then they took her to court, and got the court to rule that the barricades and checkpoints were indeed unconstitutional. So we went from having extreme security to having virtually none.

The police, you say?

The police in Puerto Rico are more decorative than functional. In fact, in an absent-minded moment, I once looked at a cop and thought, ‘I can’t believe they give those guys guns….’

So the police stood about and watched as a stream of people sauntered by, the children being urged by their parents to make maximal noise. This they did, the worst of which were the boat horns. Don’t let the size fool you: they can roar at up to 135 decibels.

That was the first problem. The second? The city had negotiated with the taxistas to provide—at a charge of five bucks per person—service from the convention center into the fiesta. There were also buses for free. So the predictable happened: nobody took the taxis and the wait for a bus could take an hour.

What follows isn’t so predictable: the taxistas became incensed, and decided to block off access on the major roads that lead to the old city.

You have to understand, Old San Juan is on a little island connected by a bridge to the mainland. Therefore, having an event of this magnitude is not so much flirting but cock-teasing disaster. My in-laws are well into their eighties, and the family was holding its breath that there would be no emergencies.

And so no one could get in to the fiesta, and there were massive traffic jams. So what did the city do? Call the cops and get the taxis towed?

Nope—they cancelled the bus service!

So the residents—those who hadn’t fled—of Old San Juan endured two days of maximal abuse, supervised by our chatting police, who did their best to ignore the crowd. The madness and the noise went on until at least three in the morning.

The café closed, since why stay open when nobody buys anything and your bathroom gets trashed? Because though the festival has great crafts and attracts decent folk during the day, at night it turns into a bacchanalia. The only thing that sells is beer.

Well, that was the first thing. The second thing? Well, the jury is out for Pablo Casellas, the son of a federal judge. The son is accused of killing his wife, and Daddy ducked under a police tape on the day of the murder.

It’s taken four months to get to this point, the principal problem being to find 12 people who didn’t think Pablo did it. The whole thing smelled from the beginning: an alleged robbery of a special pistol that later was found to have been the same type of gun that caused the victim’s death. Casellas alleged that the assailants jumped over the fence so lightly that they didn’t trample the grass, which was quite tall. Oh, and the bloodstains in Casellas’s car? Then there was the DNA….

It was all pretty clear who did it, but it almost came apart when the pathologist testified that—given her wounds—it had to be someone the victim knew, probably family. The defense seized, and petitioned for a mistrial. The judge said no.

He’ll be convicted, of course, and the verdict will be appealed.

Unlike the people who mobbed my city last weekend, Casellas had it all—money, power, status. And he was arrogant—he thought he could kill in cold blood and get away with it. He thought that everybody would believe his story and go away.

That, more than the pathetic hordes whose only fun is to come to a beautiful place and trash it, worries me. If Casellas really lived in a society where the rich can get away with murder….

…we’re screwed.

Spiderman Attacks

Readers of this blog will have to be more than usually indulgent today, since the noise that has been a constant but without (though many times directly under) has now become a noise that has come within.

Readers will also know that for the last several months, I’ve been besieged by men working to depave and brick the street below me; they’ve put in new sidewalks as well. What you may not know is that while all of this has been going on, a ficus tree has been growing relentlessly on the side of the wall of my interior patio, between my floor and the floor above.

In fact, the tree grew some fifteen feet or so, and the roots extended some fifteen feet easily below. They also extended into our apartment, growing against and onto the walls of the gallery. Oh, and roots shot through the gallery ceiling as well, since a tap root had grown laterally underneath the floor above us, and then hurtled downward. Such is the power of thirst in either the mammalian or vegetative world; we had the unique if not particularly enjoyable experience of living under a tree.

Here’s an example of what I mean:

…and here’s what it looked like from the roof:

This, mind you, is from a building in Los Angeles; my own photos are locked in a camera with a low battery.

A ficus on the side of the building is picturesque, right? Absolutely, as long as no one is living in the building, and you have no particular disinclination to see the building gradually tumble down from damp and rot. For that’s what happened to us, or rather, what might have happened. Because I just examined the thickest section of the taproot, and it was easily half a foot in circumference.

Which meant that the root of the tree had caused a six-inch crack in the wall, and had lifted up the floor of the apartment above me. And that six-inch crack? Well, every time it rained, water poured into the gallery from above. And the walls are stained green—no, not stained. The walls are green, but not with paint—with mold. Right—so we were living under a tree as well as in a Petri dish.

The problem was that rain, when it falls in the tropics, tends to fall hard, and at an angle. And the winds—as luck would have it—blow directly against the wall in which the crack had developed. Thus, water was being directed against the wall as if from a garden hose. Or rather, a hundred garden hoses.

For a long time, I was a sort of meteorological prisoner—would it rain today? For most, that means a decision no weightier than whether to take the umbrella. For me, it meant whether I would cancel my classes for the day and stand in wait with the mop.

That was one tool of the trade; the others were two white plastic basins Taí had bought to soak her feet in, and three or four disposable turkey roasting pans that Mr. Fernández had ridiculously kept, claiming that at some point in this century or the next a use might be found for them. He was not slow to point this fact out, when I reached in panic for the pans….

And then it occurred to me. I had complained for years about the activities of the neighbor or tenants above us. We had filed a complaint with the pertinent government authority—nothing was done. With the neighbor below, we filed a lawsuit that dragged on forever, and was eventually settled.

Nor were we alone in our complaints—everyone on the street, especially those who had done business with the neighbor, had a story of their own. Oh, and I’ve just checked the webpage for ramajudicialpr.gov—the judicial system’s electronic records. The neighbor has six cases against her listed. Seven, since our own does not appear….

We do many things superlatively well in Puerto Rico. We make extraordinary friends; we work harder and smarter than many, many other people. What is our stumbling block?

In an island where everything is intensely personal, we tend not to think of systems. Which means that our own system of law and order is, in general, broken. If, in Wisconsin, I had a problem with a neighbor about a tree that needed pruning / removing, I would talk to the neighbor. Most likely we would agree, the problem would be resolved, and life with the neighbor would proceed—if perhaps a bit coldly.

But everyone I know has a neighbor story—a man or woman is vacuuming floors above them at 3 in the morning (my in-laws), or leaving the building door open at 11:30PM (also my in-laws, but because of a different neighbor), or using surreptitiously the hot water (my sister-in-law).

It was my sanity or else; the Stockholm syndrome set it. In the face of continued assaults, I gave in; which is not to say that I fell in love with what had become my captor. Rather, I stopped caring.

I also stopped mopping up the floor; as well, I removed the buckets collecting the water that was pouring into our apartment. I let the water fall—as it was already falling, despite my futile efforts—into the store on the ground level below.

A store that is part of a nation-wide chain of shoe stores, with headquarters located in some Midwestern city. And then, the predictable happened.

Well, not before my friends and I had made a joke of it. The store had the predictable gunmetal gray industrial carpet, which became sopping wet.

I spurred Nydia into—at least in our imaginations—walking into the store, wrinkling her nose, and saying loudly, “¡Ay, fó! ¡Qué peste!” (“Ugh! It stinks in here!”)

Or how about….

“Oiga, ¿dónde conseguió este tono de verde para estas paredes?” (“Hey, where’d you get that shade of green on the walls?”)

Or my personal favorite…

“¿Cuánto cuestan esas setas en la parte de atrás de la tienda?” (“Say, how much are those mushrooms in the back of the store?”)

At last it happened. Corporate home office called the owner of the first floor, and told him bluntly to fix the problem or else they’d walk, if a store could walk.

A meeting was called, voices were raised, photos were taken, and the air was thick with invective. Yesterday, I spent the morning opening doors, counting cats, dealing with Carlos and José, and especially with the Spanish-born, volatile owner of the first floor, who was shouting from the roof to the workers who were working in the patio. And they, of course, were shouting back.

Today?

They reappeared, with ropes and pulleys. A man has lowered himself from the roof, entrusting his life to a rope and a ratchet. The tree has been cut—a simple affair that took no more than five minutes and a machete. The real problem was the taproot, which had burrowed fifteen feet down and in the side of the patio wall.

Well, it took no more than an hour to remove the limestone / cement surfacing that covered the side of the brick / sand / rock / who-knows-what-else mixture that forms the three-feet walls of our building; this is called mampostería, for those who have lived in Old San Juan. We now have a fair portion of the wall exposed to the elements.

Was it enough? For the workers had gone silent. Had they gone? Was I free? No—they were downstairs, eating lunch, and when they returned, they brought with them a second weapon of assault: a large, gasoline-powered device the size of a generator. What did they propose? To roar the thing to life in my patio, in order to power-wash its walls.

It’ll only take various minutes, they said.

It’s been two hours.

And now?

I have dared to peek out the window.

There is a man attached to a rope and ratchet with a power washer walking, and lashing jets of water…

…down the wall of my patio.

Back Home

Now then, this will be a short post, because in just an hour or so, I’ll have to take my non-ESA to the vet.

What? Surely you’ve heard of ESA?

OK, I’ll stop trying to shame you—I didn’t know about it either, until this morning, when I was awoken by the sound of a jackhammer below the balcony. This was both usual and unusual, since it is Saturday morning—a time normally devoted to getting rid of and over Friday night. So why were they working?

Well, in fact they have been working for months, now, and on Saturdays and even Sundays. And on the next block, they’ve even taken to working evenings, to lessen the number of days of annoyance as we speed along toward Christmas.

And what are they doing?

They are destroying and then restroying—well, seems logical to me, computer—the street outside. The street had been asphalt you see, unlike other streets in Old San Juan, which have wonderful blue adoquines. Here, see for yourself:

Well, most of the streets have these blue iridescent (especially when wet) cobblestones, and so somebody decided (somebody who lives in a gated community far, far away from the old city) to put in cobblestones everywhere. There was just one little problem: the charming old blue cobblestones are no longer made, and even if they were, they couldn’t be used. Why? Because the Institute of Puerto Rican Culture would never allow it.

It’s odd, though strangely logical—anything new in Old San Juan cannot look old. Instead, it has to look new. So therefore, the new cobblestones are not lovely iridescent blue but an ugly dull grey. Take a look….

Well, the new adoquines are made locally, so that’s a stimulus to the economy. And of course, it took about six months of labor to de-and-re-stroy the street. Oh, and the sidewalks? They used to be a very nice slate. Now they have to be a somewhat darker stone—could it be granite? Don’t think so….

Well, all of this doesn’t come cheap: one source said that repaving a four or five block street had cost more than four million bucks. And the street—Tetuán—is right behind a street that has various good and expensive restaurants. Since the kitchens are all in the back, and since the kitchens’ vents are churning fumes out during hours of operation, Tetuán has become a virtual back alley. There’s nothing there, and the smell—to me—is atrocious.

But it got done, and it got opened, and the photographers came and the media as well and the mayor at the time—Jorge Santini—was happy. That lasted about a week, until he noticed—the restaurants were throwing their greasy trash out on the sidewalk, and the adoquines looked awful. Here’s a lively account of the matter:

Tanta fue la rabia que le dio a Santini que, en la misma Tetuán, advirtió que aumentaría las multas por tirar basura y desperdicios en la calle. Fue incluso más lejos y dijo que, para comer a expensas de tirar manteca, mejor era cerrar. Poco le faltó para añadir que mejor era no comer.

“Es un crimen ambiental lanzar grasa de esa manera”, dijo en un arranque de peritaje en asuntos ecológicos y aceitosos.

Dejó claro, además, que la capital tiene que estar “a la altura” del millón de cruceristas que recibe cada año. Pudo haber dicho también a la altura de los residentes, pero ni modo.  

A rough translation:

Such was the rage that it gave Santini that, in the very same street, he warned that he would increase the fines for throwing trash and wastes in the street. He went further and said that, to eat at the expense of throwing grease, better it would be to close. He only missed adding that better it would be not to eat.

“It’s an environmental crime to throw grease in this manner,” he said, breaking down into an expert in ecological and greasy affairs.

He made it clear, as well, that the capital has to be “at its highest” for the million of cruise ship visitors which it receives every year. He could have mentioned it being at its highest for the residents, but no matter.

Ah yes, the residents, of which I am one. Or rather, the prisoners, since it was impossible, for the last six months, to be in or especially work in my apartment. Whatever noise the three jackhammers and two generators the narrow street reverberated with was deemed insufficient was augmented by the happy shouts of a horde of workers, all of whom separated from each other when attempting to communicate, all the better to strengthen their vocal chords. What am I trying to say? It was ferociously loud.

And hot, as August and September are, in the gropics (meant tropics, but shouldn’t there be a word “gropics?” Like it, somehow…), hot like hell itself. Oh, and did I mention that Luis, the sculptor, came back—and resumed his creative endeavors, which apparently involve banging violently the floor above me with various blunt (I hope) objects?

Well, guess what? The street, at long last, is done. So why, I asked, was there someone with a jackhammer out there at 8AM on a Saturday morning? Easy enough to see: it was the water company, and what are they doing? What they do, which is to break up the sidewalk, shattering all the lovely granite that was so costily (well, we have “expensively,” don’t we, computer?) and arduously and most especially noisily installed.

Mr. Fernández can be easily persuaded to launch into a jeremiad about this, a jeremiad in which the British will be held up as behaving in a civilized—OK, civilised in the honor …err, honour—manner by carefully removing the slate on the sidewalk, placing it neatly to the side, going about their subterranean business, and then neatly replacing it, so that passerby never knew that anything had occurred.

Unfortunately, I observed this on my first trip to London.

Which means that they don’t do what the boys did below—leave a pile of shattered granite shards around a gaping hole, over which a wooden saw board has been placed. Nor do they do what the gas company did down on Tetuán Street, which was to take the jackhammer to several hundred of the 164,700 new adoquines, breaking them up, piling them on the sidewalk, and leaving a crater several feet in diameter in the street, which is now impassable. Oh, wrong—passable if you drive on the sidewalk, which is no problem.

See?

“It’s the quietest building in New York,” said John, and it’s true. How true? I tested it the next morning, and spent a lovely five minutes hearing the clock tick. And now?

Back home!  

(Update on this highly important post—the little granite shards surrounding the water meter are not there. Instead, they have been whisked away? But why? Why go through all that trouble? Then I remembered—in the last craft fair—seeing someone selling little granite paperweights, the stone appearing identical to the sidewalk stone. But that wasn’t the point. On the stone had been painted the flag of Puerto Rico, and it has to be said: so lusty is our love of our island, that you can sell anything as long as it has the flag of Puerto Rico. Wow—so that lady walked away with a purse-load of twenties! See? There’s a purpose for everything….)

A Writer and His Deadline

Let’s face it—every writer needs a deadline. And so I tell you—it’s 11AM, I have spent an hour or two surfing for something interesting to write about. News flash—the world is in terrible shape.

Ooops—sorry. According to my friend Rafael, “terrible” along with words like “awful” and “horrible” are words to be avoided. Why? Because they carry a disproportionate emotional weight. You had a terrible day at the office? What happened—a coworker went postal, pulled out the semiautomatic, and shot up the office, leaving another coworker to die in your arms?

I considered briefly telling you about Wisconsin, in case you’ve missed my rants. And in fact, I even read up on something called a long range acoustic device (LRAD). I know about such a thing because I was on Facebook, looking at the following photo:

Beneath the photo was a reference to the LRAD, with the news that one had been used in the capitol yesterday. Right, so I trotted over to Wikipedia, and here’s what they say:

In 2004, Carl Gruenler, a former vice president of military and government operations for American Technology Corporation said that being within 100 metres (330 ft) of the LRAD is extremely painful, and that it was designed for use in short bursts at 300 metres (980 ft), to give targeted people a headache. He said that "you definitely don't want to be" within 100 m; and, that the device will cause permanent auditory damage.[3] LRAD officials deny such common uses, claiming that the device is not a weapon, rather it is a "directed-sound communications system", and that it can damage hearing at 15 metres (49 ft).

To be fair, there are many varieties of LRADs. And apparently, yesterday in the Wisconsin State Capitol it was a smaller version of the device that was used. But that begs the point—why use it at all? The rotunda, the location of the protest, is round and very echo-y. (Or maybe echophonous, as in cacophonous?) Actually, even a megaphone is overkill.

Well, as you can see in the video below, it’s a controversial device.

It’s become progressively more repressive, the police response to the protesters. First they couldn’t assemble—they had to get a permit. Then bystanders were threatened with arrest. Then people were informed—taking photos or video was not allowed. And now this—the use of a very nice tool to communicate with someone two miles away, but torture to anyone nearby.

As it happens, I am particularly sensitive to sound, and especially at this time. As I write, the street outside is being pounded with jackhammers, a portable generator is roaring away, and a large scooper is tossing chunks of asphalt into a truck. And this evening, a few short hours after the workers have left, the partier will have arrived, to start a street fair.

I wrote about it before; here’s what I said:

The United Nations and the European Court of Human Rights have banned the use of loud music in interrogations, but it is still being widely used. The term torture is sometimes used to describe the practice. While it is acknowledged by US interrogation experts that it causes discomfort, it has also been characterized by them as causing no "long term effects."[1]

Ya—enough! Would you like to see some totally wonderful art? Check out the Danish artist Peter Callesen….

Definitely what I feel like before coffee….

Right, that’s fun…. Now, how about…

    

Damn—it’s 12:08. Missed the deadline!

Half a Million Minus Two

That’s how many people are going to try to stuff themselves into an eight-block by four-block, fragile, historic, abused-and-still-lovely city.

You can guess who the minus two are….

It might have been the empty rum bottle that got launched at Mr. Fernández, that early morning last year. Granted he was screaming, but so were they. (Now that Franny’s not stirring about, can I get away with saying “well, they started it first?” Or will I get a celestial response on the lines of “well, if everybody jumped out the window….”) Or perhaps it’s the sight of body fluids you really don’t want to see or—especially—smell. And there is something nice about sleep.

The half-million will be celebrating Las Fiestas de la Calle San Sebastián, a charming and also terrible festival that occurs every year at the end of January.

How can it be both charming and terrible?

It’s really two festivals. The first takes place during the day; families come out, stroll through the streets, buy artisan pieces, enjoy the weather.

After dark, it gets considerably edgier. To me, over-the-edgier. Imagine a crowd of people in which a new form of involuntary locomotion gets invented. I tried it once—I lifted my feet, and was carried by the crowd.

And no, it was not relaxing.

Add into this mix “music” at very high volumes. Then a collective blood alcohol level of at least .25. Plus, some idiot dreamed up this stupid horn (called something like “zarzuela”, but it’s not) that is way loud, and guess who has one outside of my door?

Very good—everyone.

It was all dreamed up quite recently in 1970 by a charming old lady, doña Rafaela Valladares, who thought it would be nice to help the artisans, get the neighbors together, raise a little money, and extend Christmas (which hardly needs it). Well, it took off, since Puerto Ricans never need to be urged to party harder. Party is something we do in Puerto Rico.

And there are good things about the Fiestas. You can see cabezudos like this:

Or how about the vejigantes?

Remember when the teacher left the room? That’s how the evening starts out. As  the night goes on and the drunkenness goes up, it turns into a stampede just about to happen. You definitely have to be young to endure it.

Oh, and by the way—thanks for asking—the bottle missed.

But why stick around for the next one?

On Edge

Tell me again—when did we agree that it was OK to play your music into my ears?

I know, I know—you must be tired of this rant. Look, everybody’s life is hard, and mostly getting harder. You don’t need this.

So here’s the good news. It wasn’t I, this time, who lost control. Just the guy next to me, on a supremely jammed subway train on the upper West Side of Manhattan at 8AM.

Well, we crammed ourselves in, and a black woman and boyfriend were having sharp words. I tuned them out, of course—do I need that? Isn’t getting to the airport on time with two bags in a subway car holding people in the low three figures enough?

Well, miraculously, a seat became vacant. I sat, figuring to chill until Columbus Circle. That’s when the black guy flipped on a transistor radio and treated us all to some (I think / presume) hip-hop.

Let me put this gently, Refined Reader. Every stanza made explicit and very street reference to the pudenda of African-American females.

We all stood it for a couple of minutes. Then the eye telegraphs began among us—the brows furled, the eyes flicking heavenward, the shoulders shrugging. And then the guy next to me said, loudly but politely…

“Would you please turn that down!”

Guess the response…

Second time, and note the absence of “please.”

“TURN THAT DOWN.”

Just realized—it can’t be a response since it wasn’t a response. It was…what? Ignoration? Ignor-ance? Ignorance? You choose….

The guy has the insight to say…

“I’M LOSING MY CONTROL!”

But he doesn’t have the power to act on it. Instead, he lunges across several people to get at the black guy.

I don’t do well in emergencies. I look on, a stunned witness, as the lion mauls me, or the scorpion plunges its stinger into my foot.

So I was not among the group of guys who separated the two.

I did hear, however, the screaming rage of the black woman as she soundly (pun intended) berated the white guy. Must have had some effect—the guy sat down, and then said, “I apologize for my behavior.”

“I am leaving this train,” said the black woman, stomping out of the car. Her boyfriend / husband sauntered out—every movement a “fuck you.”

The man was shaking with rage—I could feel it just sitting next to him.

Well, first question—am I gonna go there?

Nope.

I’m not letting that into my day. Which was very nice—got to the airport with plenty of time, came home, scolded / caressed the cats, talked with Mr. Fernández.

Second question—why did the guy act so explosively?

Well, first there is the…right, it’s not music, so let’s call it “aural incitement.” Because make no mistake, the stuff is there to provoke rage. I once heard a song blaring down the street (started up by the Governor’s mansion, ended down by the plaza) in which the last word of each line was the endearment “motherfucker.” Took twenty minutes of meditation to wash that out….

The city is also on edge. No, not up in Upper Manhattan. But the train was coming from the Bronx. When was the last shower the guy took?

Third question—what about the black guy? Why didn’t he react? Yeah, he was trying to throw punches too—who wouldn’t? But when the situation stabilized—or perhaps was stabilized—he went back to being his insouciant self.

Well, a blogger on his toes would have the answers to all these questions. The Internet, however, is slow these days. The best I can do is to provide the conclusion of a research paper by an admittedly less-than-stellar source—The Journal of Undergraduate Psychological Research. Eliana Tropeano, in 2006, wrote the following:

This study examined whether or not watching a violent music video would provoke individuals to answer questions with violent responses. Eleven participants watched a violent music video, 11 participants watched a non- violent music video, and 11 participants were in the control group and did not watch any videos. It was found that watching the violent music video containing violent lyrics, aggressive behavior, and degrading behaviors toward women did make an individual feel and react more violently with regards to responses to questions about fictitious scenarios. The conclusion was that watching violent music videos does negatively affect behavior.

Well, well, so the dog bit the man. Nice to know.

Now, here’s my absolutely un-researched theory. This music does what pornography does. It blunts you, stupefies you, and puts you into a mindless state of inert violence.

And what happens when there’s a trigger?