The Curious Case of the Parrot Rustler, Resolved

Now that it’s over, now that the stress is off, now that justice has been done…but wait, was it?

Readers of this blog know the story—Montalvo, a 21-year old kid whom I barely know but who has made me several hundred dollars of excellent coffee, got it into his head to…wait, I’ll do bullets:

·      Get stoned up to his tits

·      Wander the streets of Old San Juan

·      Interact with a blue macaw, estimated value $15,000

·      Really look into the bird’s eye

·      Feel a magical connection to the bird

·      Magical turns to mystical!

·      Share a destiny with the bird

·      Remember that it’s his mother’s birthday

·      Put the bird on his shoulder

·      Take numerous selfies of himself and the bird

·      Decide to give the bird to his mother

·      Stroll to his apartment in the seaside community of La Perla, where the police arrest him

You may ask, and Montalvo—in his stoned-up-to-his-tits state was probably asking as well—why did the police arrest him? What was the big deal?

There are, it appears, people in this world who bring an unduly fussy approach to the concept of private property. As well, that macaw was a working bird, since its job was, yes, to sit on shoulders, as it obligingly did with Montalvo. Unfortunately, Montalvo, instead of venturing to La Perla, was supposed to smile, get his picture taken, and then pay 20 bucks and take the photo.

There was another problem—the picturesque seaside community of La Perla has a commendable system of local justice: it’s swift, cost-effective and certainly efficient. And for certain offenses, the community….

OK—drop the ironic voice. Two days ago, somebody stumbled on a dead body right in front of La Perla, and I spent several hours worrying that it was Montalvo.

“There was a guy with a tattoo of a number under his right eye—and he spent several hours looking through the window,” said María, who works in the coffee shop where Montalvo had worked and been fired seven times. There’s something about Montalvo—he has second chances as cats do lives.

The guy with the tattoo was replaced by a punk with a mohawk.

The community, you see, was interested in resolving an issue with Montalvo, since he had violated a sacred precept of the group: you don’t bring the police into La Perla.

So that was a problem, since the owner of the café has her 14-year old daughter being home-schooled in the café.

For this act of parrot rustling, Montalvo was sent to prison in a neighboring town, where the first question presented to him was his gang affiliation. The prisons, you see, are segregated by gangs, in this case either the Ñetas or the G27s. And how do all these gentlemen get along? All amicable in the gang world?

To give you an idea—the G27s call the Ñetas gusanos, or worms. The Ñetas call the G27s insectos.

Montalvo, in short, was going to have to declare an affiliation. Nor was that the worst—Montalvo was 21, relatively short, and cute. So what had saved his virginity, those eight days he spent in jail before his mom bailed him out? Well, he’s a vegetarian, and the prison was reliably feeding him meat. So Montalvo gave the meat to his cellmate, who announced to everybody that Montalvo was off limits, guys, Montalvo was his meat, so to speak. So, for eight days it worked, but would it work for eight years?

“Where the hell are his parents,” I said to Lady. Well, the father has been out of the picture for most of a decade. Mom has no money, and not much patience, since this road? It’s not the road less traveled.

There’s a wonderfully descriptive and extremely coarse word —beginning with the letters pendej… in Spanish which means a little pubic hair. Why? Because there are some people who sit around and watch while someone else is having all the fun.

Also, there are some people who pay while someone else has the fun….

“So what are we gonna do,” I ask Lady.

Lady knew a lawyer, who put the matter quite succinctly to Montalvo: you fucked up.

For that he went to law school?

So all was perfectly splendid; Montalvo drifted off to Arecibo, to spend quality time with his grandmother and get away—very incidentally—from the heated air of Old San Juan. During that time, and the day before the trial, we got the tab for the lawyer.

It was not cheap.

Nor was it unreasonable. Because the likelihood that Montalvo could sail into court, get everything settled in one day, and walk out was less than likely. The cops had to show up, and guess what? They worked a night shift the night before, and then they’re gonna go sit in court all day? Nah—so they don’t show up. Or the parrot guy—who, by the way, had been convicted of stealing a parrot himself, or so said the street—he might not show up. Not to mention the judge…. In short, in Puerto Rico we have a plethora of people who might not show up….

It came down to the wire—what were we gonna do? Would we throw Montalvo to the wolves, let him take his chances with a public defender, and live with knowing that Montalvo was getting raped in prison?

Readers, send me congratulations and prayers.

I’m a father.

Damn fool got two years probation.

Just don’t expect cigars.

I’m broke!

How Do You Solve a Problem Like Montalvo?

“It’s like walking into a sit-com,” said Gaby, who both works and frequents The Poet’s Passage, where I write. “All the familiar characters are there. Marc is writing, Johann is reading or napping, Carlos is being a pirate. It’s wonderfully normal and predictable.”

That could be true. For example, a gentleman in white tights, white face, and a red nose has just greeted me—silently—by offering his hand and then posing in still life for several seconds. So if you’re a clown, or a writer, or a pirate—well, where else do you go?

Which may have been why it wasn’t surprising, somehow, when Lady, the owner of the café, told me the news, “Montalvo’s in jail.”

“What,” I said, “what did he do?”

“He stole a parrot!”

“Yeah, from the parrot guy, who works down by the cruise ships, when they come in. You know, he has five or six parrots, and he charges twenty bucks for a picture of the parrots resting on your arms and shoulders. Good business….”

“Montalvo stole one of that guy’s parrots?!”

“Yeah, and then he went running into La Perla, where he lives, and the cops were chasing after him, and now he’s in prison in Bayamón….” 

“Wow—didn’t think the police went into La Perla…”

“Well, they usually don’t,” said Lady, “but they did for Montalvo!”

My friend Sonia once described La Perla as a modern medieval city; medieval because it sprang up without planning between the walls of Old San Juan and the sea. It’s a hodgepodge of streets, alleys, walkways and once ramshackle wood houses that sheltered the poor but honest people who worked in Old San Juan. Now? Well, it’s rumored to be a haven for drug dealers. The only time the police go into La Perla, in general, is when they can do it essentially as the Army went into Iraq: shock and awe.

“So what are we going to do about Montalvo,” I asked Lady.

“His mother called me—and she doesn’t want me to bail him out. He’s 21 years old, and she wants him to learn his lesson. So she told me—no bail.”

Montalvo, you see, has worked for the café seven times, and has also been fired from the café seven times. At the time of his arrest, he was in the fired phase, and thus had no money.

“So why did he steal the parrot,” I asked.

“It was his mother’s birthday, and he didn’t have anything to give her!”

“So he stole the parrot!”

“Well, for his mother….” said Lady defensively, and then she started to laugh.

“I just have this picture of Montalvo running like crazy with the parrot on his shoulder, and the cops with their billy-clubs chasing after him, like the Keystone Cops….”

OK—so his mother didn’t want him out on bail. The plan then became to visit on Saturday, possibly with a cake with a metal file in it.

That was until yesterday.

“Eight whole fucking days, and not one fucking person called to find out how I was! I was in there over a fucking week, and who calls? So today, I call all the missed calls, and guess what? They all wanted something—not one of them was calling about me! So fuck all of them!”

He’s angry, and also buzz-cut—prison apparently takes after the army that way. We talk him down.

“Well, I was high, up to my tits,” he said. “And the thing was, the parrot came to me! I mean, the guy was texting or screwing around with his phone—he wasn’t even paying attention to his birds! And then the parrot jumped on my lap! So there I am, patting this bird and really getting into him and he’s looking at me with these intense eyes, and the next thing I know, I’m walking—fucking WALKING, not running—away with the bird. I mean, I even stopped and took selfies of me and the bird! I mean, look.”

He handed over the phone….

“It’s sort of a twist on the Monty Python routine,” I said.  “’I ain’t stealing the parrot, it was restin’ on my shoulder….’”

We passed the phone around.

“The bird looks great,” I said, “but Jesus, Montalvo, you look stoned!”

“…to my tits,” he repeated.

“And what kind of bird was it,” I said. “Gorgeous color….”

“That’s the thing,” said Montalvo, “of all the fucking birds, I had to go steal the most expensive one: a Blue Macaw. I mean, there are like 3,000 of them in the entire world, and there’s a list of everyone who owns one. So what the hell was I going to do with a Blue Macaw in La Perla? I didn’t have a cage, I didn’t have anything to feed it, I didn’t have any money to buy it food….”

“Champagne taste,” I told him.

“So how much was the bird worth,” I asked.

“That’s the thing—I had to go steal a 25,000 dollar bird!”

“What!”

“Yeah, 25,000 fucking dollars.

“Yeah, the cops were telling me ‘if you had stolen one of the $500 dollar birds, your bail would have been a lot less’ and they were right,’ he said. And went on to say, “you know, I’m really glad they arrested me, because if not, the dealers in La Perla would have killed me and fed me to the sharks….”

Justice outside the walls of the city is a little different.

“Do you have any experience representing parrot rustlers,” I asked Kayla. Because, guess what? It’s four PM, and Montalvo has his preliminary hearing in court at 8:30 the next morning. And Montalvo, with the twelve dollars in his pocket?

Right—it’s now Adventures in Paternity, or Fatherhood 101, or maybe a sort of alternative to the old TV show, “This Is Your Life”—all the people who weren’t in your life. Because I’m now feeling quite father-like.

“He’s a basically good kid,” I told Kayla, who’s a lawyer. “So I haven’t told him what my father told my brother….”

“What was that,” she said.

“Montalvo, you are going to HAVE to be honest, because you are too goddamned STUPID to be a criminal!”

“Did he wince,” said Kayla.

“Well, he looked down at the floor,” I told her. “So I guess that’s a wince.”

Guess what? Lawyers drink coffee, which is really good news, since Lady looked up and realized with a start: that wasn’t a customer, that was the cavalry coming over the hill.

The moment comes.

“How are we doing this,” I ask her. The lawyer has been getting Montalvo’s side of the story. But there’s a problem—he’s not a criminal lawyer, and he’s not sure that he’s up to the job. So he wants to consult his partner—who is a criminal lawyer.

“Half and half,” said Lady. “That’s how we always do it, right?”

Who knows how much it’ll be, but what are we going to do? The judge told him, the day she set bail, that if convicted, Montalvo could face eight years in jail.

“I’m gonna go out and find that parrot guy,” said Lady. “What if he dropped the charges? We’ll tell him that Montalvo’s the future national poet of Puerto Rico, he’s 21, he was stoned.”

“Up to my tits,” said Montalvo, who apparently likes the phrase.

“I’d go with an animal activist defense,” said Jessica, who had drifted by, kissed Montalvo, rubbed his buzz cut. “The bird was clearly abused and was attracted to Montalvo’s energy.”

“He was probably attracted to Montalvo’s dope fumes,” I said, “since we now know that Montalvo…”

“Up to…”

I cut him off.

“Do you have a tie?” I asked Montalvo. It’s now several hours later, and it occurred to me—what was he going to wear to court? So there Montalvo was, in my apartment, rummaging for shoes to wear.

“Too bad the shoes aren’t black,” I told him. “Otherwise, with the white shirt, black pants, and a tie, you make a perfect Mormon missionary!”

So we tied his tie for him, loosened it, and sent him on his way. I tell Raf that Montalvo is one stupid kid, but what could I do?

“Look at it this way,” he said, “at least you never had to change his diaper….”

All Wrong, As Usual!

OK, look—if this post is more all-over-the-map than usual, there’s a reason.

The damn iPod is all twitty again.

Or rather, it’s following its own internal logic.

Here is—I think—the explanation. 

I had a hankering to hear the opus 40 cello sonata of Shostakovich. So I went into iTunes and looked it up. And there was the big boy himself—Rostropovich, for whom the sonata was written. 

Well, that’s like hearing King James read the Bible. Nobody has ever said Rostropovich couldn’t find his way around a cello.

Eleven bucks—I nabbed it. 

Plus I got a zillion other pieces—this must have been a box set with five or six discs.

And each disc starts with the number one.

Get where I’m going? 

Right, came to the end of the 1^st movement, and then got a tango by Astor Whatever-his-name-is (Pizzarella? Doesn’t seem right…).

Fine, listened to that. Then got a bit of Prokofiev. Then the second movement of the Schumann cello concerto. Then the second movement of the Shostakovich.

Well, I either pressed the damn shuffle key again (possible) or the iPod is playing EVERY track 1 before it progresses to track 2 (likely).

Well, I’m nothing if not resilient these days—thanks, Wal-Mart!—and the purpose of the daily trot is just the trot. And saying, of course, buen día to everyone I meet.

Especially strangers.

It was a thing of Sam Walton’s—the ten foot rule. You gotta say hello, smile, and offer help to anyone within ten feet. That’s if you’re in a store. Otherwise, just smile and say hello.

Well, I did it, of course. Franny must have had some effect on me. Remember that “regular morning hour” her report card adjured on her (not sure that’s correct) when she was a kid? 

Well, when Sam speaks, you listen!

It’s part of making the day. If you’ve been laid off, you don’t get up and lie on the sofa. You grab your shoes and iPad and get moving.

And saying hello to people makes friends, connections. Which is why I was talking to Elvin, the 64 year old Nuyorican who’s working on the building next door.

Fascinating guy. Lives in La Perla, one of the most storied communities of Puerto Rico. Quite literally, the social anthropologist Oscar Lewis wrote extensively about it in 1967 his book La Vida.

OK—for people who don’t know Puerto Rico. Viejo San Juan is the oldest city on the island, and was walled / fortified by the Spaniards. It’s charming—got blue cobblestones that are iridescent when wet, wonderful colonial architecture, vibrant Caribbean colors.

La Perla is its shadow.

Almost literally.  Because the walls are still intact, and the community is wedged between the walls of the Old City and the sea. Take a look!

 Charming, right?

Yes and no. La Perla sprung up quite spontaneously about a century ago. All the cooks and servants for the rich people of Old San Juan, needed a place to sleep, right? And nobody had much money (‘cept for those rich people, who even so may not have had much…). So they went through the gates of the walls, past the cemetery, and found a little land. Built a little house with whatever they could find. And that’s where they lived. 

Everything was fine, and, in a sense, still is. Everybody knows Elvin, the guy I was chatting with yesterday. Everyone likes him. His shop is right in front of the beach, and he sleeps with his window open—no bars, unlike the rest of us. Nothing but salt air between him and the sea.

Sleeps well, too.

Unlike the rest of us, who are living in fear, in gated communities behind barred windows and doors. Oh—and the latest trend? Putting GPS sensors in your kid’s backpacks, so you can track ‘em if anything happens to them….

But if you’re safe in La Perla, you’re safer than anywhere in the world.

Why?

“Anyone messes with my stuff, I spread the word. They find out who did it, tie him up, and throw him in the ocean.”

Remember—there are sharks off the coast of Puerto Rico.

And the “they?”

Well, Spanish is less fussy about specifying the subject—less fussy than English. You can say lo encuentran—literally, they encounter him—and everyone gets it.

But the they may well be somewhat different than the good, hardworking types of a century ago. And La Perla is perhaps not quite so poor. The wood shacks have become concrete houses, over the years. And one of them—you can see from the safety of the walls—has a swimming pool on the roof.

Overlooking the ocean.

Nice!

So it’s not quite the community that Elvin remembers as a kid. His aunt raised him in La Perla. When she left the house, she told her neighbor. Neighbor looked after the house. Aunt came home, cooked, and gave the first plate—arroz conhabichuelas, no doubt, and hmmmm….I can taste ‘em!—to the neighbor.

Actually, the whole neighborhood ate together. People brought what they had, passed it around, sat, talked, laughed, told stories.

Oh, and watch out—‘cause ANY adult could smack a kid who needed it….

Well, those days are gone. Elvin worries, thinks Puerto Rico is going to hell in a hand basket. 

“I hope it doesn’t go the way of France,” he said.

“Two hundred years ago?” I said, startled.

Remember when kids knew about the French Revolution?

“Yup,” he replied.

Well, he’s a good man, my new friend Elvin. Just one little thing.

He’s technically a squatter. 

And that’s where Harry comes into the picture.

“Did you once tell me that reality is different in Puerto Rico? Years ago, in Chicago?” I asked.

“Yes.”

Look, there was land that nobody wanted and there was wood that nobody wanted and Elvin’s aunt’s father or grandfather needed a place to sleep, so what’s the deal?

Turns out that somebody wants it, now.

“Sometime between 2005 and 2007 Donald Trump was fascinated with La Perla as it would be a great place to make a resort. He was looking at it from above and wanted to walk down and see it closer but his bodyguards wouldn’t let him. La Perla residents saw this, heard him [sic.] we know what’s going on. Also some Spanish developers apparently have their eye on the area as well,” Gómez told reporters.

Go ahead, google “La Perla Puerto Rico Donald Trump” and you’ll get the prdailysun.com article from which I stole the above.

Well, I started this post by typing out the title—All Wrong, As Usual. That’s because I had read an article about how to create a great blog. Gotta have keywords right near the top (“keywords?” ummmmm???…). Gotta put in links. And tags.

I was going to tell you that I’m doing this blog all wrong.

But then Elvin jumped into the post, and then La Perla, and now we’re forced into the question of whether we’d prefer to have Trump / Spanish developers and a resort or…

…drug dealers reclining in their infinity pools after a hard night’s work in the puntos de drogas or…

…the remnants of the descendents of Elvin’s aunt, who still remember a place that was and that now isn’t and that still is.

And I’m doing it wrong?