Montalvo Reinstated

Who knows what drew him? For he had been away for several weeks now, since his mother had moved to Florida, his motorcycle was broken, and…well, in his words, “I’ve just been dealing with some deep shit, man….”

Remember that?

So Lady weighed in—Montalvo had flown back into our lives because it was the Fiestas de la Calle San Sebastian, which, according to El Nuevo Día, was a generally ordered affair this year, since there were only some 600,000 people in a seven-by-seven street village: Old San Juan. And last year? Well, it was 600,000 minus one, since somebody got shot.

At any rate, into this mayhem Montalvo was proposing to insert himself, since he had inherited his mother’s business, and was therefore donning the official uniform of the enterprise: Here’s the photo.   

“Lick my tight-ies,” I told him, and not for the first time, since I had seen it before, and said the same thing. So, dredged from the harbor of elementary school knowledge, I told him about long and short vowels, and the effects of single versus double consonants.

“It’s the difference between ‘moping’ and ‘mopping,’” I told them, Lady being present. The problem? Neither one knew what moping was, so it was a quick detour, until ‘hoping’ and ‘hopping’ came into view.

So there he was, in the Poet’s Passage, but also—significantly—in front of the television, which had finally agreed to get up on the wall, and—we hope—stay put. ‘It figures,’ I thought. ‘Of course we would put up the television, and the very next thing—“one clear call for me,” as the poet sang—Montalvo would appear.’

“Man, you guys gotta treat me like a grown-up! I be a business-owner now—not just some kid from the hood!"

The business, apparently, involves popsicles formed in the shape of—look, do I have to tell you?—nor is that all. Apparently, the tities—ah, computer, for once we agree!—contain alcohol, and so his mother and now Montalvo have adopted the business practice of walking the beach with the dogs and a cooler, and selling refreshment and a buzz to the recumbent tourists. Now, Montalvo was proposing to bring his tities to the fiesta, to notch the general inebriety of it all one-step further.

“Man, I wish I hadn’t cut my hair, all so I could get some lame-ass job. I ain’t never gonna work for the man again!”

He directed a look at Lady, who had been “the man” on repeated occasions.

“Lick my tight-ies,” she responded.

“Hey listen, Dad,” he told me, “my mom said I should find a place in the old city to crash at night, cause getting in and out is gonna be murder.”

Well, sane advice, since we were dealing with an hourglass situation: How to get 600,000 people out of the old city and into the mainland. There is, after all, only one road in and one road out.

“So I’m looking for a place to stay this week…”

Remember “nudge nudge / wink wink?”

“I have no guilt,” said Lady, walking up the steps to my apartment, in order to be in-serviced on the cats. “He is NOT staying in the Poet’s Passage.”

“He’s not staying here,” I told her, “Raf and I don’t let anybody stay here except Taí if one of us isn’t here….”

So I gave her the dope on the cats, which is pretty simple—so simple that it occurs to me, why do we make it so hard? Because we are not only cook—well, OK, food service provider—we’re also the lunchroom monitor, since none of the cats want to eat from their bowl—a concept about which they acknowledge nothing—but instead run to the other cats’ bowls. So while I am doing Sudoku of an evening, I am also hearing Raf scream, “Loquito! Gordito!” All this accompanied by various thuds and thwacks—almost all of which fail to connect.

So then we drift back to the café, since a seventy-inch television has a powerful gravitational pull, and that’s when Lady says it.

“It’s been a dream of mine for years, to have a really good television…”

“Kick-ass,” puts into Montalvo, less for clarification than admiration.

“…so that we can do Button Poetry.”

Here’s why you have friends, since I have no idea what Button Poetry is. And if you don’t either, here’s a quote from their website:

Button Poetry was founded in 2011 by Sam Cook and Sierra DeMulder, who were shortly joined by Rachele Cermak, and Heidi Lear. They launched the first Button website and blog.

In March, Button hosted its first recording party to produce Button Poetry: Volume One, featuring Sierra DeMulder, Sam Cook, Dylan Garity, Hieu Nguyen, Kait Rokowski, and Shane Hawley, along with many other Twin Cities poets.

Starting in May, Sam and Button teamed up with Poetry Observed to film and produce a series of high-quality poetry videos.

OK—that’s the description, but the reality?

Good news, Dear Readers! You can put aside ISIS and the Republicans and Boko Haram. Check out the video—by a guy from, ahem, Madison Wisconsin—below. This video which has been viewed 8, 831, 505 times on YouTube.

8,831, 505 times—there’s hope for us all!

          

Coming Soon--an Opera Cafe to your City!

“We absolutely have to do this, since if we don’t, Joyce DiDonato will be totally disappointed and that would be more than I could bear.”

That’s what I was telling Lady on the day that we set off to buy the largest television we could afford at Costco. And was Lady listening? Of course not, since we were all grumpy: the coffee hadn’t clicked in for me, Sunshine had spent twenty minutes looking for parking, and Lady had been getting increasingly irritated updates on guess-what from Sunshine.

“Dammit, doesn’t he know the law of attraction? He comes to San Juan with his mind made up—no parking. So what does he find? Of course, no parking. So he has a yeyo and gets it into his head that he has to pay for parking in the municipal lot. What is he—made of money?”

That’s when Sunshine, driving the car ahead of us, sailed right past an empty parking space. So then Lady is honking her horn and gesticulating “why” with one hand while pointing backward with the other. Which may have put Sunshine in the mood to greet the street porter as his long lost brother, which meant they instantly embraced, and then began trading insults.

And who might the street porters be? Well, these are resourceful men and women who adopt a block and then assist drivers in parallel parking. So for two years of bricking the street, I endured generators and jackhammers. Now, what do I get? A guy nearly as loud as the jackhammer shouting, “DALE DALE DALE DALE DALE!” Once the parking is done, the guy “offers” to look after your car, since you wouldn’t want anything to happen to you car, would you? WOULD YOU? So these gentlemen have very cleverly gotten the municipality to completely repave the street for them, and have now converted public property to private property. For make no mistake—any other street porter intruding on territory is looking for a fight.

So Sunshine at last parks the car, but is the porter satisfied? Of course not—he’s putting his two thumbs down and smacking his forehead and then he goes to verify the chasm between curb and car, and spreads his arms nearly as far as he can to show Sunshine. So that means that now he and Sunshine have shifted to mute mode—being that there’s a windowpane between them. But no matter, since hands are just as effective as voices, which we learn when the porter—at last satisfied with Sunshine’s parking—comes over to let us know. He points to Sunshine, then swirls both index fingers around his temples, and whistles through his two—and only—teeth. So we get the news: Sunshine’s crazy.

OK—no news there, since the last time we had gone anywhere with Sunshine, he had ended up covering his exposed male parts, after recklessly taking off his swimming trunks in the deep end of the pool, and spinning them like a lasso over his head, all the while shouting, “Whoopeee! I’m a cowboy!” Lady and I took one look at each other and who knows who said, “let’s go!” But I can report that Lady is a strong swimmer, or just more than usually curious…..

Nor was once enough for Sunshine, since he repeated the trick, with predictable results. But this time Lady and I shunned the male parts, and attempted to seize the swimming trunks. Rather inadvisably, Sunshine opted to throw them, which meant that while Lady and I couldn’t grab them, Rafael could. And did. And then got out of the pool, and made gestures to fling the trunks over the chain link fence.

Well, I’m pleased to report that Sunshine kept his pants reasonably well on for the drive to Costco, and a merry time it was. So then we had to find the television, since I had gotten it into my head: audience building. Because the average person doesn’t like opera—or so they say. But who could not like opera? Remember the famous Sull’aria from the movie The Shawshank Redemption? It turned droves of people onto opera.

So the plan is put the television in the Poet’s Passage, and have opera Saturdays, and since someone was good enough to put YouTube into the world, and since a million opera fans have uploaded full operas—well, why not start an opera café, at least for one day a week?

“Besides, it’ll be great for Ilia, Raf’s mother, since she loves opera but her husband…well, not so much. So we’ll be starting a major new trend, converting millions of people to opera, and giving pleasure to a little old lady who sorely needs it.”

So we bought a 70-inch set, and then wheeled it to the SUV we had borrowed to transport it.

“I’m lying under the TV,” said Lady, and both Sunshine and I fought it for as long as we could. But the thing about Lady? She always gets what she wants, and so there she was, lying on her back under a 70-inch TV and munching on blackberries. She couldn’t have been happier. That’s when I remember Joyce DiDonato, about whom I have gone through obsession and am now into stalking, if only electronically.

“She’s this totally cool, completely unaffected mezzo-soprano who started out wanting to be a music teacher, but then got drawn into opera. So when she was in Chicago last year, she spent an intermission at the Lyric Opera talking to a group of kids from Youth Opera Council. And the kids were totally into it.”

“Well, that’s how it happened for me,” said Lady, whose aunts used to take her to the opera.

“And that’s what happened to Montalvo, who at age 21 could have been the great-grand child of most of the audience. But remember his characterization of Iago in Otello? It was along the lines of, ‘wow, that’s some badass Niggah,’ a sentiment he shared in full, almost operatic, voice. All of the ladies’ hair turned one shade bluer….”

So we plan it out: we’re starting with a Mozart Festival, since once you’ve seen Magic Flute, Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni, and Cosi—well, you’re either hooked or deaf.

“I’ll definitely have to tweet this to Joyce, since she has to know, and spread the idea of the opera café throughout the major metropolises of the world. In fact, she should refuse to sing in any city without an opera café….”

“But she has to give us credit,” said Lady, always on the lookout for marketing.

“Absolutely,” I told her. “We’ll be world famous! We’ll be in Wikipedia! Kids will be whistling Un Bel Di as they walk down the street. Mothers will be threatening to take away their children’s opera privileges if they fail in school. Fathers will beg their sons to play baseball—but miss the Saturday afternoon broadcast from the Met? No effing way….”

It’s pleasant to think about, and Lady keeps munching on blackberries, and Sunshine reaches for some. But just at that moment, the blackberry supply had been converted into the raw material for blackberry pie, so Lady gives him only one. He’s reasonably content and…

…at least he kept his pants on!

      

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!