Ah, Youth!

Well, the question, the sizzling question that bedeviled our days and vexed our nights was…

…would Montalvo be able to piss in a bottle?

He’s back, you see, having wedged his way in through the door of the sister shop first, and then having passed once or twice in the gift shop that adjoins the café—where he has worked and been fired so often that no one can remember how many times it’s been—and then having appeared in disguise on Tuesday night for Poetry Night.

“I was not in disguise,” sputters Montalvo, whose name has been changed to protect the guilty. Montalvo, you see, had formed a mystical, transcendental, liminal attachment to a rare blue bird—of which there are only five thousand or so in the world. Nor was it surprising, that attachment, which was greatly enhanced by a drug that only guys in Colorado can do legally. So he had a tangle—no, call it a collision—with the law, was the object of a lot of men’s attention during his eight-day jail stay, and got off by agreeing to piss in a bottle weekly for a year.

“I was wearing shades and a hoodie, that’s all,” say Montalvo.

“You looked like a hood, and nobody recognized you,” said Lady, “so that’s a disguise, right?”

So he’s back, which is where he should be, since home? Well, it’s sometimes not all domestic bliss.

“She was slapping me, just ‘cause I came home at 3 in the morning after smoking cigars and drinking whisky with some friends! Can you believe it? Slapping me, my own mother! And why do women think they got the right to slap men? If I did that to them, they’d call the cops on me, slap a restraining order on me, throw me in the jug! Sure, it doesn’t hurt, but it hurts here….”

He taps his chest above his heart.

“It’s your mom’s house,” I tell him. “Her house, her rules. You know what? My mother would never have allowed me back in the house, at age twenty-one, unless I were working—and paying rent—or studying. And there would always be rules, one of which would have been not coming home drunk at 3 AM. So why Puerto Rican women let their sons come home, use the place like a hotel, expect food and laundry services—I just don’t get it.”

He’s upset; his girlfriend has broken up with him. Oh, and slapped him around, too.

“You know what? If you got two people slapping you around, you must be doing something that really pisses them off. So maybe it’s time to think about what that is?”

Am I man enough to be a dad?

“Yeah, but it hurts here….”

Again the tap.

“They shouldn’t have done it, but that doesn’t let you off the hook,” I told him. It’s a balancing act, this fatherhood thing, and you gotta cut a little slack sometimes.

So we’ve agreed to get together every Friday and work on our projects: his first book of poetry, and my magnum opus,  A Year at The Poet’s Passage. It’s all the best posts of this illustrious and international blog. Order your copy today!

The problem? Montalvo doesn’t have a computer, just an iPad, and a keyboard that his sister doesn’t seem to be using, so he’s sure that he can take it….

“Do you want a third woman slapping you?”

Did I mention that Montalvo is fatally, and certainly criminally, twenty-one?

So that meant that Montalvo showed up around ten one night, when Mr. Fernández and I were sitting around, errr …. drinking whisky and smoking cigars. So guess who joined us?

It wasn’t enough, you see, to procure the legal services to save—and I mean this quite literally—Montalvo’s ass for eight days (he was the object or subject or maybe both of constant catcalls, those eight days in the slammer), now I had to lend him a computer. Why? Because whatever app he was going to use to process the words that would then turn to poetry probably wouldn’t produce a file format that any publisher could work with. Which was easier? Lend him my spare computer, or go through the headache of file conversion?

So here I am, writing this, and in thirty minutes he’s supposed to show up. Oh, and guess what? It turns out that we’re not going to be working on our projects but, instead, on his project, since what has Lady told him?

“You know, you can send me these poems, and they’re good and all, but they’re full of misspellings. I could correct them, but you know whose really a great editor? Who can really tear a new hole in you? Marc! Man, he’s fierce!”

Damn….

“So what did he say?”

“He said, ‘yeah, my man!’”

“That’s what he always says,” I tell her, and Lady goes off to see what might be going on in the kitchen.

So he’ll be here, or he won’t, and I’ll know, or I won’t, whether he peed in the bottle today because yesterday? It was the beginning of the National Stop (Paro Nacional—which should be General Strike, but I like National Stop better….) And indeed it was a national stop because all of the protesters took over the tunnel that connects everything to everything else, and nobody moved. Well, not the cars, at least, but the protesters had brought guitars and tambourines and various percussion instruments—all to keep up the ánimo, and very important that is—so there was plenty of stationary movement. As well as entertainment….

I think I’ve learned the first lesson of fatherhood….

…youth must be served!