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!