You know all about it—the 73 billion bucks that the 16 or so
public agencies plus the general government in Puerto Rico owe. And you know
that the governor came out last Sunday in The New York Times saying that the
debt was “non-payable.” So we are in full crisis, or near full crisis, since we
did manage to pay 1.9 billion bucks that we owed. And you even have read the Krueger report,
which details all the various paths that led inexorably to the edge of this
cliff.
But while the island has been in crisis, the café where I
write has been in crisis, too.
“I have to raise $60,000 by the end of the month, Marc,”
said Lady, who was faced with the twin challenge of just getting to the bathroom,
since about half of her shin had been removed in a recent surgery. So she was
crippled on various fronts.
Well, there were various attempts at help, though there was
also a certain lack of coordination. In fact, for insouciant
going-your-own-way, poets could teach even cats a trick or two.
There was Geronimo, who declared that he would cook a
delicious dinner, all with the finest ingredients that he had himself collected
from remote and mountainous locations on the island.
“He made lasagna out of nettles, Marc,” reported Sunshine
the next day. “I mean, I saw him making the stuff, and he couldn’t even touch
the things. So he was using this!” Sunshine then held up the large tongs that
bakeries use to get the doughnuts out of the cases.
“And he expected anyone to eat this stuff? I mean look at
this.”
So he showed me a completely untouched tray of lasagna, each
piece of which was adorned with, yes, a nettle.
“So did anyone come?”
“That’s what I asked Lady…”
“And?”
“Seis de mis proprios
gatos….”
Right—six of her own cats, which is twice the usual number
for describing an event failure, but still not very good.
“Then Geronimo turned around and told Lady that she owed him $170, since he had spent that on ingredients! Can you believe that?”
“Well, those nettles don’t come cheap….”
It had been rather unpromising from the beginning, since
Geronimo had conceived the affair based on the purchase of tickets, the minimum
price being $60 per person. The only trouble was that even the person nominally
in charge of the event—as well, putatively, of Geronimo—couldn’t understand the
concept. So that boiled over into hurt feelings and recriminations and then,
when another friend (who had not incidentally contributed 1000 bucks to help)
had stepped in to mediate, Geronimo had ordered her out of the kitchen. Well,
well—we all know that chefs can be fussy.
The next step was to set up a crowd funding site, and so
Lady’s sister-in-law—her Latin blood at full boil—stepped up and created a site
on GoFundMe.com. She described
with the pen of Dickens the dastardly actions of the legal foe that had brought
Lady and the Passage to the brink, nor did she spare the adjectives, of which
“petty, vindictive, mean-spirited” were the more palatable. Ah, it was vigorous
indeed but…
“Lady, you have GOT to take that thing off the Internet, and
you’d better hope your step-father or whoever he is hasn’t seen it. Oh, and
especially the judge!”
“BUT IT’S TRUE!” cried Lady, who was anyway not at her best,
since now it wasn’t going to the bathroom, but rather going down the 25 steps
out of her apartment that had been the challenge.
“So write it to me and text me…”
Right—do that, and then to the work of….well, what?
Shouldn’t there be signs? How are people going to know that there’s a crisis? I
decided to try to make a flyer, since my version of Word has templates for such
things, but guess what? The photo—which anyway was upside down and refused to
get right side up, and who knew that a photo could get so drunk?—was either
swallowing the headline—Save The Poet’s Passage—or the headline was swallowing
the photo. The point was, they were't not cooperating, which meant that the good Taí,
always my cavalry coming over whatever technological hill I’m in front, had to
step in. This she did, efficiently, and even refused payment! Thanks, Taí.
So now it’s time to herd up the many people who love the
Poet’s Passage, who kiss Lady every time they see her, and ask her for twenty
or thirty bucks half the time they see her. If Lady could find the word
“no” in her capacious and poetic vocabulary, she’d have the 60 grand.
“I’ll join you, just as soon as I finish this poem,” says
Carly, a poet and ex-worker, who was exed after some financial unpleasantness.
“MOTHERFUH! I can’t believe that Niggah ain’t out here with
us, pounding these damn streets under this fuckin’ sun!”
So said Montalvo, whom I had enlisted, along with Norma. So
it’s just the three of us out there, since Carly is grappling with the double
weight of double paternity, which means that he is absorbing the poetic and
air-conditioned atmosphere of the Passage, while his girlfriend calmly observes
the twins shitting on the all-white sofa.
“Well, I’ve certainly found out who the sharks are,” said
Lady, since she had been fielding various proposals to buy the building at
ridiculous sums, or buy the café for the purpose of turning it into a cat
café—brilliant, but impossible according to the Health Department—or other
schemes, all very much not to the benefit of Lady.
So it all worked out, though a day before Lady had to go
into court and tell the judge if she had the sixty grand, she was still over
ten thousand short. But no problem, since 10 grand materialized in an “off-line
donation,” and somebody just donated 15 bucks 26 minutes ago, even though the
goal has been reached (we’re at $60, 720) and the crisis is officially over.
So we’ve moved on, or rather not, since the point of it all
was that nobody wanted to move on—not Elizabeth’s two children who have
valiantly responding to the crisis by alternately playing video games or
snoozing, and not Carly nor his girl friend nor their progeny, doing what
progeny do in the first year of life, and not the tall grey-haired gringo in the corner, who knows—slightly—how
Lady got the sixty grand she needed to keep us all in place.
What don’t I know?
Where in the hell Puerto Rico is gonna get 73 billion!
