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!

          

A Tribute to Puerto Rico

What I should do, the responsible thing to do, is to give you the official Iguana opinion on the terrorist attack of the French newspaper, Charlie Hedbo. And in fact, I wrote something last week, along the lines that however much there are peace-loving Muslims, there is just a little bit of complicity in the Muslim world toward its terrorist elements. Remember those girls kidnapped by the Boko Haram? Well, they’re still wherever they are—presumably enjoying the benefits and blisses of marriage—and the Boko Haram went on another rampage, this time destroying an entire village and killing two thousand people. So 12 people die in Paris, and 2000 die in a now destroyed town in Nigeria. Right—now we know our priorities. But my point was this:

The government has made no official comment on the alleged massacres. President Goodluck Jonathan skimmed security issues when he relaunched his re-election bid in front of thousands of cheering supporters in the economic capital, Lagos, on Thursday.

OK—so why should I care about 2000 people killed and who knows how many displaced if the president of the damned country doesn’t? In Paris, the president of the nation was right out there, but Goodluck? Well, no Luck.

Well, it troubles me—you legion of readers out there who are left in the dark, not knowing whether you should be Vous êtes Charlie Hedbo ou non. I admit it: I’ve let you down.

Closer to home, though more distant in time, did you know that the third building of the World Trade Center is the focus of an extensive conspiracy theory, and that there are 2200 engineers and architects—so says one guy—who think that the reason for the collapse was a controlled demolition? The building—building number 7—wasn’t hit by high-jacked planes, but when the second tower collapsed, it hit building 7, starting office fires. The BBC, as you can see in the video below, says the demolition theory is a crock of you-know-what, but is that enough to dissuade a true conspiracist? Of course not, so in the spirit of fairness for which this blog is massively famed, here’s one the comments:

911 was planned by our own government and corporations, to make lots of money from starting two unnecessary wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Dickhead Cheney's former company Halliburtion made 39 billion dollars from the Iraq War, which Cheney got his cut. Building 7 fell straight down in 6.5 seconds, nearly freefall speed from office fires. There were 47 steel vertical beams running the height of Building 7, and all 47 of them had to fail simultaneously to make the building come down the way it did. Equally, the WTC towers exploded down to the ground. How do 110 solid concrete floors blast out completely, in the form of dust already in mid--air from mere "collapse"? Watch videos and see the hundreds of tiny explosions going off in the smoke clouds after the buildings started falling. On 9/11/01 the laws of physics took a vacation!  

Right—so now I have to worry: Should I tell all you out there that you can’t trust the American government? That there are men and (a very few) women so jaded that they would send thousands of people to their deaths, all for a few nice wars? Well, it’s a sticky moral dilemma: If you’re lucky enough to believe in the essential decency of mankind, should I, a mere blogger, rape your innocence?

So I was busy watching the video, when Lady came in, with the news that she had decided: The Poet’s Passage was closing for the Fiestas de la Calle San Sebastian, since after partying hard in the Calle San Sebastian, there tended to be a second festival on Calle Cruz, where the Poet’s Passage is located. And since the poets had fled, the café had become The Drunks Pissing Everywhere Passage. And it was a sort of reworking of the slave triangle: All of the adolescents from the suburbs—rich and poor—crammed into the city, spent all their money on beer on Calle San Sebastian, and pissed it away—don’t have to tell you that’s literally—in the Poet’s Passage. Wisely, Lady decided to break the chain, or the triangle, or whatever.

So then Nydia—Raf’s sister—comes into the café with the news: She’s fleeing the city, since somebody had decreed that the vuvuzelas would be banned his year at the festival. And what is a vuvuzela? Well, they were originally used to summon distant villages in Africa to attend tribal events. But now, they’ve been used in soccer games. Here’s what Wikipedia has to say:

The vuvuzela has been the subject of controversy when used by spectators at football matches. Its high sound pressure levels at close range can lead to permanent hearing loss for unprotected ears after exposure,^[6] with a sound level of 120 dB(A) (the threshold of pain) at 1 metre (3.3 ft) from the device opening.

OK—this festival is a stampede-waiting-to-happen, since at it’s worst, walking is unnecessary: You lift your feet and the crowd carries you along. So imagine the effect of having not one vuvuzela but five or ten, all within one meter of you? So the officials had decreed: No vuvuzelas! But the police?

“They all hate the mayor, so every time they saw somebody with that trumpet from hell, they gave them the thumbs up. So I’m going to the country, where I can meditate….”

And so we are both refuges, this weekend, and then we go on to talk about how hard life in San Juan is, for the residents. But somehow, the genius of the place takes over, since instead of grumbling like gringos, we’re now laughing about the idiotic things that flow so naturally here. Consider Yolandita—officially Yolandita Monge, but everyone knows her on a first-name basis—who buried her philandering husband, and then made a huge scene at the funeral, which everybody was watching and making jokes about. Jokes so offensive that Yolandita would sing no more, no more, in her native land, but would travel afar, where she could be given the respect which should be accorded her, as an artista. Hah! Take that!

But there was a problem, since she had buried her husband, and the press was camped out, to see if she would appear, dressed in her widow weeds, to throw herself wailing on his grave. (A likely possibility, since she had to be restrained from flinging herself into the casket….) So now Yolandita wants to exhume her late husband, and cremate him, so that she can carry him around with her, as she sings everywhere else but you-know-where.

Simple, right?

Well, not quite, since hubby’s best friend came forward and objected, saying he had forbidden cremation on that terrible day when he—Yolandita being prostrated with grief and sedatives—had had to go make the arrangements. And why had he forbiddn cremation?

Hubby had pleaded with him never to allow it, since hubby was terrified of cremation.

This makes perfect sense, though minds of a more wintry clime might ask—how can a dead man…

But we can be sure all of this is legit, since the best friend of hubby? He’s…

…a medical doctor!

So we’re laughing like fools, since who could not want to live in a place where absurdity sits at the head of the table? And then I told her about the fire at the Bacardi rum factory, where a tourist riding the little trolley films what is a completely normal day. So there they are, getting the story of the famous Mexican architect, who fashioned the pavilion in the form of the company’s emblem or mascot or what-ever-it-is: A bat! And did you know that there is a special rum produced for (inaudible) Bacardi, the fifth-generation descendant of the original settler from Cuba? Yes, it’s a normal, normal day, and a normal, normal scene that the tourist is filming, only excepting the…

…huge, billowing cloud of smoke from the fire raging at one of the buildings on the grounds!

Well, it was good to know that the driver of the trolley was practicing safety first—keeping his eyes on the road!—though as you can see, the video comes to a complete halt, presumably when the news that the Bacardi Museum was on the right was preempted by a bit more urgent, like, “OH FUCK!”

So we’re laughing at this, and then I told Nydia what her mother had told me: You’ll never leave Puerto Rico, you’ll just stay and keep laughing at it!

But she said it kindly.

Just to make sure, I told her: I pay tribute to Puerto Rico through laughter.

   

     

  

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!

      

Of Plumbers and Falling Water

There was absolutely nothing wrong with him—he was perfect in all respects: he did his work efficiently, he was pleasant, he was completely fluent in one language, and then (after some significant chatting) he went away. What more could anyone want from a plumber?

Well, he never showed up.

At least, that’s how I figured it, since he didn’t arrive on Friday, promised to come on Saturday but couldn’t, was off doing something else on Monday, and—in theory—spent two hours looking for parking in Old San Juan on Wednesday. Oh, and another day? Well, it was raining—and we all know how plumbers feel about water!

So we didn’t have a sink but a slop bucket, and guess who got to lug that all the way down the hall to the bathroom? Well, my right arm now could be mistaken for Schwarzenegger’s, and I’m walking with a pronounced list to the right, as well, but no worries! Hasn’t changed my politics!

So I called the company yesterday, and they assured me that they were panting, almost drooling to do business with me, but the parking in Old San Juan. Impossible, as we all know, since it’s never good and especially now, since it’s Christmas. And did I mention that a couple of days ago, there were three huge cruise ships in the harbor, and so the streets and especially the sidewalks were clogged with tourists, all of them very much on vacation time, which meant that they tended to move at half anyone’s normal pace for ten feet, and then stop, to call out hellos to other people they knew from the cruise. And since two of them were Carnival cruises, the tourists tended to be….

Has anybody every written about classicism and cruise lines? Because anybody in Old San Juan will tell you: you don’t have to run down to the harbor, a simple look outside on the sidewalk will tell you. If you see silver-haired, white, trim, sixty-year old guys wearing the latest in Polo and accompanied by a slender, beautiful, thirty year old blond woman, you’ll know that the Silver Spirit is in town. And their website? It’s so exclusive that they decline to allow me to download a picture of their cruise ship so that I can upload it to you. They did permit me, however, to copy the paragraph describing their best accommodation. Enjoy!

The name Owners Suite says it all. A stylish apartment. Prestigious and classic. For those whose standards are higher than most on a cruise.  Available as a one-bedroom configuration or as two-bedrooms (as illustrated) by adjoining with a Vista Suite.

Naturally, this doesn’t come cheap for “those whose standards….” So what’s the tab? Well, I really can’t tell you, because unlike any other website, they decline to dirty themselves with electronic pricing. Instead, they ask you to provide contact information, and assure you that a “representative” will call you in the next business day. That gives them time—presumably—to look you up on Forbes 500 richest list.

OK—that’s Silver Spirit. What about Carnival? It’s the exact opposite.

So anybody can see that my plumber and his company were completely justified in declining to come to San Juan unless…

“Yes,” I asked.

I provided parking.

OK—it was a day when my behavior was a bit more tropical than Nordic. Or was it that I was speaking Spanish? Because I hit the roof.

“Look,” I said, “we’ve been using you guys for twenty years, and never once have we had to provide parking. Nobody in San Juan provides parking! There’s no city in the world…”

So this morning, I was waiting for Juan, and fiddling around on my computer, since any serious writing was impossible, because what if Juan came as the muse was crooning in my ear? What would she do, if I told her that a mere plumber was of greater interest to me than she? Would she desert me for the guy at the next table? Would she ever come back?

So Juan called just as I was absorbing the interesting fact that…well, here it is: in 1928, Edgar made the first direct Pittsburgh to Paris telephone call to enquire about a designer dress.

Edgar being E. J. Kaufmann, the guy who commissioned Frank Lloyd Wright to build Fall Water. Right—always good to know about the first direct call from Pittsburgh to Paris—but Juan’s call, when it came, was a trifle more interesting. And guess what! He was here, but he couldn’t find…parking!

I sputtered, I fumed, I provided the list of three parking lots that could accommodate a pickup truck, I spoke so loudly that I woke up Taí, who came out of a profound sleep to enquire whether there was a bull fight going on. Then I went back to reading about Falling Water—and did you know that Mrs. Kaufmann could read in three languages: English, French and German? Wow—that’s class.

So I was making coffee—not that my stomach needed it, since it was rough seas down there, but just because it was the one thing I could do—when Juan arrived. Taí and I instantly got down to our knees and kissed his feet and hands, since the Stockholm Effect had taken hold, and we begged him to grace our kitchen. Oh, and we gave him coffee.

Well, this company has the interesting habit—though lucrative, for some—of coming (after repeated pleas and promises) fixing something, and then breaking something! Quite a business model—since the last time, Freddy the plumber broke two very beautiful and quite expensive faucet handles, and then pointed out that it was a very good thing, since who would want things so difficult to replace? So now we’re wonderfully happy with Home Depot’s cheapest, and Freddy was good enough to take away the remaining two pristine—and stupidly expensive—handles! Now that’s service!

So Juan had come, fixed the clog, and then broke the canasta of the sink—though it was probably our fault, since we had used Drano—horrors!—and that might have made the plastic brittle. So there he was, after having tested our love and devotion over the past week to see if we really wanted him.

Right—so then it was the work of ten minutes to fix the problem, after which I took Juan firmly be the hand and lead him to the morning room, where he could do no further damage. Juan then told me the entire history of his life, as well as the complete chronology of interesting events in his hometown, and I now can tell you that I know more about Juan than I do about Mr. and Mrs. Kaufmann. So I paid him a hundred buck—no charge for the history!—and went off to the café, where I discovered…

…toilet’s broken!