Jus' Misbehavin'

It was another day in the café, and this time’s annoyance, for Lady,—owner and house painter—were the religious people.

“Can you believe it? They wanted me to customize a house, by putting this piece of scripture around the door. So I had to figure out—how to place the words for maximum effect, visually, but also for the meaning of the text. And it took me an hour or so, and I finally got what was the best design. So now they just called me, and they don’t like it; they say it looks too crowded. Oh, and guess what? It’s too crowded, but they want me to ADD more text! Can you believe that?”

“Working with the public...” I say, “It ain’t easy….”

“Right, and now they’re over at the other store, and there’s poor David, who’s half-atheist, and they’re grilling him about what church he goes to. So he tells them—he doesn’t go to church, which did to them what the red cape does to the bull. So they’re telling him there’s only one path to salvation, and David has to start stuffing his face with food, even though he’s not hungry, so as not to be able to talk. So now I have to go rescue David, and deal with the religious people, and change their little house, by adding more text which will make it—somehow—less crowded.”

“Ouch,” I said.

Lady brightened.

“Hey, why don’t you come with me? You could give me cover!”

“I’d probably misbehave,” I said. “With few exceptions, I can’t deal with heavily religious people. I make the Jehovah Witnesses crazy every time I pass them on the street—which is about seven times daily, they’re everywhere—by shouting my heartiest ¡Buenos días! followed by soy ateo. It makes them crazy….”

Soy ateo—I’m an atheist.

“Right,” said Lady, “OK, it would probably be a violation of fire code, or something, to have you guys together in the store. Pity, though….”

Well, I had been occupying myself with Jessye Norman for most of the morning, and was ready to take a break. First, though, it was time to check in on Naïa, to find what she had gotten up to.

“What is this, a siege mentality?,” I asked, since Naïa was sitting on a couch surrounded by six plastic chairs placed in a semicircle.

‘I don’t know what that is,” said Naïa.

I keep forgetting she’s twelve.

Well, I guessed right, because in fact Naïa was fortifying herself—and her dragon—from an imminent attack from her archenemy—for the purpose of this game—Alexia, also equipped with a dragon.

“Excellent idea,” I tell Naïa, “and putting the red pillows on the seats of the chairs will make, as you rightly pointed out, a standing-on-the-chairs attack less likely to succeed. But I can identify six gaping areas of vulnerability….”

“Don’t tell her,” said Naïa.

“I already knew,” said Alexia, who obviously didn’t.

An hour later, I came back to discover an additional six chairs, which had been placed on their backs, with the seats covering the space between the legs of the chairs in front of them.

Then I went to the grocery store, and, while waiting in line, thought, ‘well, why not?’ 

So I headed off to the other store, and gave Lady no chance to greet me.

“Excuse me, is your name Lady?”

“Last time I checked!”

“You don’t know me,” I said, “but they told me at the café that I could find you here. And that’s…”

I glance down at the casita, the little plaster house that Lady has painted, complete with the offending scripture.

“WOW, is that beautiful,” I exclaim. “That’s LOVELY! Did you do that? That’s incredible. And what’s the verse around the door?”

“Luke 17:4,” or some such thing, says Lady, who begins to rattle it off to me.

I’m nodding my head all the time.

“I know it well,” I breathe, my voice sopping with earnestness. “Ah, that verse has been with me in my darkest hours! How often, in moments of spiritual desolation, in the very darkest night of the soul, in those moments of spiritual anguish, when I most questioned the path that I had taken, that very verse accompanied me—nay, rescued me—from spiritual oblivion.”    

I pause to take a breath….

“It’s a masterpiece,” I tell Lady. “An unbelievable piece of work. I can’t believe how lucky I am to have seen it.”

Lady has recovered.

“Thanks,” she says, “I like it myself….”

Right, so I dash off, after fictitiously getting permission to play my cello at the café—“would it be ok…..?”—and having glanced at a very confused, as well as religious, woman.

An hour later, I’m playing Bach, after first noting that the siege has been lifted, or maybe the dragons have been banished—anyway, the forts are gone and the chairs are back to being chairs. So I work my way through G Major, get through d Minor, and then am in the prelude of the C Major when it happens.

A two-year old toddles in, looking intently at me, her round face framed by blonde curls. The Gerber people completely screwed up when they passed over this kid for the one on their bottles, and a note to any Renaissance painters out there…

…you’re seriously going to have to reconsider how you’re painting your cherubim.

So she watches me, intently, and that’s permitted, since part of what I do, pretentiously speaking, is audience building. And who doesn’t like little girls? So, she stares, and then begins to…

…pee.

All right, that’s a first, so what to do? Well, I take my cello to the bathroom—another first—and grab some paper towels. Then I go back to the little girl, who has taken off her little panties and is trying to mop the floor with them.

“No te preocupes”, I tell the little girl. “Pero ¿dónde está tu mamá?”

Don’t worry, but where’s your mom?

A woman appears, and says something I don’t get. Then Gaby, from the café, appears with some little red flip-flops. Next, Elizabeth appears, and she gets the mop. At this point, the girl has vanished.

“That lady shouldn’t have that child,” says Elizabeth. “She can’t take care of her, she’s retarded or crazy or something.”

“Some asshole got that poor girl pregnant,” says the normally pacific Jorge; it’s the first time I’ve heard him swear. “I see her pushing her daughter in the stroller down the middle of the street, right in front of the Hacienda building. And the traffic is totally backed up behind her….”

“That’s horrible,” I said, “shouldn’t we report?”

“Don’t know,” said Jorge. “They’ll come and take the child away, but where will they put her?”

“You know what she did when I told her ‘no?’ She was about to sweep some ceramic houses off the counter, so I bent down and told her ‘no’—firmly but gently. And then guess what?”

Elizabeth puts down the mop and begins slapping both sides of her face with both hands, saying ‘NO’ with each blow.

“That’s what her mother is doing to her,” say Raf, when I tell him hours later.

‘Life is so damned unfair,’ I think. ‘There’s Naïa, whose one worry is of a dragon snatching, and then there’s this little girl, and can you imagine—if she’s pissing on the floor in a café—what her house looks and smells like? And there are two people—Edwin and the woman I don’t like—who are homeless, and sleeping in the most comfortable corners of the café they can find, probably because they’re up all night. And then there’s Elizabeth, who hasn’t gotten child support for months, and who decided it was too much trouble….’

‘And the worst of it? It’s all around us, and we go blind to it. Remember that study of people walking past their closest relatives, who were dressed up as street people? There’s so much out there that we’ve trained ourselves not to see, and everyone knows this woman can’t take care of her child, but we all do nothing, which is the most heartbreaking thing of all.’

‘It’s some screwy world,’ I think, ‘Raf and I can’t even get married in Puerto Rico, much less have a child, but this woman? Not a problem—she can have as many children as she wants. So it’s a question: a cherub walks into my life, pisses on the floor, and what to do—report it to the Departamento de la Familia or not?’

I learned a long time ago: I have more questions than answers, and that’s the way it should be.

But I wish I had the answer to this question….