Montalvo Reinstated

Who knows what drew him? For he had been away for several weeks now, since his mother had moved to Florida, his motorcycle was broken, and…well, in his words, “I’ve just been dealing with some deep shit, man….”

Remember that?

So Lady weighed in—Montalvo had flown back into our lives because it was the Fiestas de la Calle San Sebastian, which, according to El Nuevo Día, was a generally ordered affair this year, since there were only some 600,000 people in a seven-by-seven street village: Old San Juan. And last year? Well, it was 600,000 minus one, since somebody got shot.

At any rate, into this mayhem Montalvo was proposing to insert himself, since he had inherited his mother’s business, and was therefore donning the official uniform of the enterprise: Here’s the photo.   

“Lick my tight-ies,” I told him, and not for the first time, since I had seen it before, and said the same thing. So, dredged from the harbor of elementary school knowledge, I told him about long and short vowels, and the effects of single versus double consonants.

“It’s the difference between ‘moping’ and ‘mopping,’” I told them, Lady being present. The problem? Neither one knew what moping was, so it was a quick detour, until ‘hoping’ and ‘hopping’ came into view.

So there he was, in the Poet’s Passage, but also—significantly—in front of the television, which had finally agreed to get up on the wall, and—we hope—stay put. ‘It figures,’ I thought. ‘Of course we would put up the television, and the very next thing—“one clear call for me,” as the poet sang—Montalvo would appear.’

“Man, you guys gotta treat me like a grown-up! I be a business-owner now—not just some kid from the hood!"

The business, apparently, involves popsicles formed in the shape of—look, do I have to tell you?—nor is that all. Apparently, the tities—ah, computer, for once we agree!—contain alcohol, and so his mother and now Montalvo have adopted the business practice of walking the beach with the dogs and a cooler, and selling refreshment and a buzz to the recumbent tourists. Now, Montalvo was proposing to bring his tities to the fiesta, to notch the general inebriety of it all one-step further.

“Man, I wish I hadn’t cut my hair, all so I could get some lame-ass job. I ain’t never gonna work for the man again!”

He directed a look at Lady, who had been “the man” on repeated occasions.

“Lick my tight-ies,” she responded.

“Hey listen, Dad,” he told me, “my mom said I should find a place in the old city to crash at night, cause getting in and out is gonna be murder.”

Well, sane advice, since we were dealing with an hourglass situation: How to get 600,000 people out of the old city and into the mainland. There is, after all, only one road in and one road out.

“So I’m looking for a place to stay this week…”

Remember “nudge nudge / wink wink?”

“I have no guilt,” said Lady, walking up the steps to my apartment, in order to be in-serviced on the cats. “He is NOT staying in the Poet’s Passage.”

“He’s not staying here,” I told her, “Raf and I don’t let anybody stay here except Taí if one of us isn’t here….”

So I gave her the dope on the cats, which is pretty simple—so simple that it occurs to me, why do we make it so hard? Because we are not only cook—well, OK, food service provider—we’re also the lunchroom monitor, since none of the cats want to eat from their bowl—a concept about which they acknowledge nothing—but instead run to the other cats’ bowls. So while I am doing Sudoku of an evening, I am also hearing Raf scream, “Loquito! Gordito!” All this accompanied by various thuds and thwacks—almost all of which fail to connect.

So then we drift back to the café, since a seventy-inch television has a powerful gravitational pull, and that’s when Lady says it.

“It’s been a dream of mine for years, to have a really good television…”

“Kick-ass,” puts into Montalvo, less for clarification than admiration.

“…so that we can do Button Poetry.”

Here’s why you have friends, since I have no idea what Button Poetry is. And if you don’t either, here’s a quote from their website:

Button Poetry was founded in 2011 by Sam Cook and Sierra DeMulder, who were shortly joined by Rachele Cermak, and Heidi Lear. They launched the first Button website and blog.

In March, Button hosted its first recording party to produce Button Poetry: Volume One, featuring Sierra DeMulder, Sam Cook, Dylan Garity, Hieu Nguyen, Kait Rokowski, and Shane Hawley, along with many other Twin Cities poets.

Starting in May, Sam and Button teamed up with Poetry Observed to film and produce a series of high-quality poetry videos.

OK—that’s the description, but the reality?

Good news, Dear Readers! You can put aside ISIS and the Republicans and Boko Haram. Check out the video—by a guy from, ahem, Madison Wisconsin—below. This video which has been viewed 8, 831, 505 times on YouTube.

8,831, 505 times—there’s hope for us all!

          

Leafless but Friendful In Old San Juan

When did my world disappear?

I remember it dimly—I had energy, I walked three miles a day, sometimes I even threw myself in the ocean for five minutes before I went home and did my day.

Now? Well, I spoke two hours ago with my shrink, since I had missed an appointment that I swear was for 3PM and the receptionist swears was at 1PM. So two hours ago, you could have had the unique experience of seeing a middle-aged gringo sobbing in the streets—OK, a sidewalk—of Old San Juan as he talked to his shrink and implored, nay begged, nay pleaded with all the demented passion of a junkie craving a fix for his shrink to give him…

…papaya leaves!

“How far in the disease are you,” asked my shrink, and the disease? Chikungunya, and if you don’t know it, consider yourself blessed. Because in my case, it’s not the pain, it’s not the stiffness, it’s massive depression accompanied by a complete lack of emotional resilience.

Consider that—after a rocky start—my mood was quite good: I had seen Lady, the owner of the café, and she had given me—free!—coffee, since I had invented a new  drink. The couplet, or double espresso—yes, all the coffees have poetic names (the single espresso is the Haiku)—was obviously not going to cut it. So I told Lady, “make me a quatrain!”

Lady knew just what to do—she often does—and came back with a mugful (can’t believe the computer allowed that! And doesn’t the apparent word “mugful” look like it should be a place somewhere in Saudi Arabia? Or is it just me? Or is it the chikungunya?) of espresso. So she sat down, and remarked that she was feeling happy, and wondered how long it could last.

“Things fall apart, the center cannot hold, mere anarchy is unleashed upon the world,”—and thank you, W. B., and were you having the Chikungunya, too?—and that’s when Simon comes in. Who’s Simon? A former employee, whom everyone suspected had his hands in the—wait, Legal just told me I can’t say it, but it rhymes with “hill”—so Lady confronted him, and he admitted it. Then she fired him, but he’s a poet and his girlfriend is six months pregnant with twins, and Simon is jobless—so where is he to go? Back to the Poet’s Passage, where Lady kisses him, and hugs the girlfriend, and pats the babies through however many layers of clothes and human tissue. See? We can overcome these little unpleasantnesses here at the Passage.

“Oh, by the way, excellent placement of the painting,” I tell Lady.

Painting? It’s actually more like a drop cloth used in five or six paint jobs, all involving shades of the color white, that someone decided to put on a stretcher. And if you look on it too long, that’s where you’ll be, too.

“We have a problem with this painting,” said Lady, after we had unearthed it in the Great Water Rationing That Never Was Crisis. We had both glanced at it, and were gasping and covering our eyes—“nobody can stand it!”

Her solution?

Hang it in the men’s room!

So then it’s time to go talk to Sunshine, working at the café and now serving me quatrains, and who is most importantly living next to a papaya tree, the leaves of which are haunting my days and upsetting my nights. Because according to Ayurvedic medicine, boiling up some crushed papaya leaves will shoot my platelet count through the hoops and I’ll win the game.

Well, That’s what Montalvo said, three months ago, and I had gone back to the papaya tree from which Montalvo had purloined the leaves and guess what? The tree is the same size, but the leaves—which in Montalvo’s day had been waist high—were now in Marc’s day tiptoe high. Since I am 6’3”, I have an evolutionary advantage over everybody else—should I inseminate someone just to pass the genetic material? Pity to have it go to waste.

Sunshine—true to his name—however, has a fear of both the dark and snakes, and since he lives way up in the hills, he has to leave for work at insane hours. Actually, he leaves early just to avoid the morning rush hour, comes into the café, and snoozes on the couch.

So Sunshine is leafless, as am I, but he does tell me that his neighbor just signed a contract to sell iguana meat to—Legal, again—but it’s a chain of Chinese restaurants. Oh, and that his neighbor also catches mongooses—mongeese?—and sells them to the Santería people. Apparently, the mongooses are so nasty that the going price is 400 bucks.

“Yuck, I wouldn’t do it,” said Lady, after I had proposed going up to the hills and catching a few mongooses, as well as scoring some papaya leaves, “they’re vicious,” meaning the animal, not the leaves….

…though come to think of it, the taste of that extract….

So now it’s an hour later, and guess what? Naïa, the 12-year old daughter of Lady who deserted us all to go to some bogus school, has come back to the café, so now we get the news that Naïa has refused to be a fairy in the school dance so now she’ll be a judge. Oh, and that her English teacher is Miss Kniffen…

“Clearly an alias,” I tell her, “and I don’t like that school at all. And speaking of fairies, I didn’t see a single straight boy, that day I went there. In fact, one kid was so blatant that I patted him on the back and said, ‘excellent choice of sexual orientation!’”

“You did not,” says Naïa, who treats me with all seriousness I deserve. “And mom, I want a mongoose, a snake, and the Jungle Stick Insect.”

Well, Lady is good with the snake, having had a boa as a kid, but any further negotiation is impossible, since Lady gets the text that Norma, is going into the…

“…Marc, what do you call the thing where they fly?”

“The Air Force,” I tell here.

Well, we all knew she would, so what was the big deal? Lady predicted the date!

“Great,” I tell her, “so how long before I’m done with the chikungunya?”

She ponders this, and stares for half a minute, analyzing my energy.

Answer—18 more days. Oh, and that I’ll give it to someone else, since the disease will have to go somewhere, of course. Anybody can see that!

“Marc, please, please—don’t give it to me,” she pleads, and I promise her—I’d never do that. So she drifts off, and that’s when I realize…

…we have a problem…

She’s the only person in town who doesn’t have the disease!

   

  

Cynara, Come Home!

“She can never do this again,” said Montalvo, “and our big mistake? We should have gotten that padlock at the hardware store, and locked the gate of her apartment house. Nobody goes in or out—especially out—with suitcases!”

“I totally agree,” I said, “Imagine, just upping herself off to France, on the flimsy excuse that her husband is whole-French and her daughter is half-French. Remember how they told you, in grade school, that they hoped you’d brought enough for the whole class—when they caught you eating candy? Well, it’s the same thing: she can’t go anywhere—especially for a month—unless she takes everybody with her…”

It’s been a long month without Lady, the owner of the café, who generally mothers or sisters us as needed. Oh, and in the case of Mary Anne, her 70-something-year old neighbor, Lady even daughters her. So all of the creative verbdom, which she does so well, has left us bereft, in her absence. And we’ve been chafing without her, and now that she’s set to return, will we be reft again?  

“It was an unexcused absence, and that can’t be allowed to pass without consequences,” I tell Montalvo. “She should never be allowed to do this again.”

“And you know,” I continued, “if she were really going to be all French about it, she’d close all the businesses and we’d ALL be on vacation.” So we total it all up, and discover that it’s easily twelve people who would be trailing along with her—rather, being her distinguished guests—in France.

“It might slightly defeat the purpose of a vacation,” I told Montalvo, “to be bumping into all the people you’ve been bumping around with for the last two years, which is why I think it’s imperative—she has to rent a chateau.”

“Marc?”

OK—time for a bit of architectural enrichment. Google comes through with this:

“You gonna put fifteen people in that?” I ask him. “Remember when I told you, ‘less is more’ and you didn’t believe me? Well, in this case you were definitely right….”

So now we’re on the track of the perfect French chateau, which of course reminds me of Dorothy Parker’s perfect red rose; we take a little detour through poetry:

A single flow'r he sent me, since we met.


All tenderly his messenger he chose;


Deep-hearted, pure, with scented dew still wet -


One perfect rose.



I knew the language of the floweret;


'My fragile leaves,' it said, 'his heart enclose.'


Love long has taken for his amulet


One perfect rose.



Why is it no one ever sent me yet


One perfect limousine, do you suppose?


Ah no, it's always just my luck to get


One perfect rose.

“More iambic fucking pentameter,” remarked Montalvo, “except for the last line in all the stanzas…”

“You are not as you were under the reign of the good Cynara,” I tell him, needing to elevate things a bit from Dorothy Parker. So I derail that line by telling him that Parker had such fulminant writer’s block that her husband took to putting a human hair on the keyboard of her typewriter. As I remember it, it could be there, undisturbed, for months, though Parker swore that the nightly martinis were just recompense for a day slapping away at the keyboard….

Right, time to return to our French lodgings….

Montalvo proposes this:

“Still rather modest,” I told him. “The point, after all, is that you want volitional, not involitional, bumping into people. Try this….”

“Motherfuck,” he says, “they let Niggahs in there?”

“Lady will tell them,” I say. “Hey, and imagine drinking sherry before dinner here….”

“The staff will have to be sent away on paid vacations,“ I said, “since Mr. Fernández will insist on an English staff. And of course, you’ll have to know the service names of all the staff….”

“Hunh?”

“What do we call the chauffeur?”

“His name?”

“Wrong—the chauffeur is always ‘James.’”

“Hey, you can’t do that!”

“Oh, they love it,” I tell him. “And the upstairs maid?”

“No clue….”

“Daisy,” I tell him, “and the downstairs maid?”

“No idea,” he says.

“Exactly—no one cares about the downstairs maid, so she has no name!”

“But that’s terrible,” cries Montalvo. “You can’t be changing around the names of people!”

Reality sets in—how many cups of coffee will we have to sell to get a chateau for a month? We set aside the idea for a moment, and consider other plans….

“Maybe we should move everything around,” said Montalvo. “We’ll put the coffee shop in the gift shop, and vice versa. Then, when she comes back, we’ll act like nothing happened, and look at her funny, and say, ‘well of course it’s always been here. I mean, if you hadn’t been away so long….’”

“Too much work,” I told him. “And besides, she’s coming back today. Hey, what if we closed all the stores, put the hurricane shutter up, and posted big notices—OUT OF BUSINESS, LIQUIDATION!”

“EVERYTHING MUST GO!”

“On the gift shop, we put “REPOSSESSED!”

“Right, and on the café, we put ‘CLOSED BY ORDER OF THE DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH!’”

“And of course,” I mused, “We could write one of those notices to our devoted customers, thanking them for their patronage—that is, all the moolah they dropped over the years—and saying that we’ll never forget them….”

“Better yet, we go out and get one of those big black ribbons—very much in the Spanish style—and put it on the door, with the sign below it: Marc Newhouse, 1956-2014. Hah! She’ll be sorry then!”

“Don’t tempt providence,” I tell him. And that’s when I tell him…

…“We are not as we were under the reign of the good Cynara!”  
 

   Non Sum Qualis Eram Bonae sub Regno Cynarae

LAST night, ah, yesternight, betwixt her lips and mine


There fell thy shadow, Cynara! thy breath was shed


Upon my soul between the kisses and the wine;


And I was desolate and sick of an old passion,


Yea, I was desolate and bowed my head: 


I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion. 



All night upon mine heart I felt her warm heart beat,


Night-long within mine arms in love and sleep she lay;


Surely the kisses of her bought red mouth were sweet; 


But I was desolate and sick of an old passion, 


When I awoke and found the dawn was gray: 


I have been faithful to you, Cynara! in my fashion. 



I have forgot much, Cynara! gone with the wind, 


Flung roses, roses riotously with the throng,


Dancing, to put thy pale, lost lilies out of mind; 


But I was desolate and sick of an old passion,


Yea, all the time, because the dance was long; 


I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.



I cried for madder music and for stronger wine, 


But when the feast is finished and the lamps expire, 


Then falls thy shadow, Cynara! the night is thine;


And I am desolate and sick of an old passion, 


Yea, hungry for the lips of my desire:


I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.



Ernest Dowson