Notes on a Broken Life

“Why, Lady, is it that I have to produce anything today? Look at your café—it’s completely filled with known homosexuals. One of them, in fact, is exposing his…well, this is a respectable blog, so I can’t say what it is. Anyway, he’s not wearing underpants, and he’s also caressing the upper thigh of his companion. Nine couples—I just counted.”

“Well, there’s never a dull moment in the café,” said Lady. “Anyway, have you heard about my new scooter?”

I had, in fact, since her brother had told me. What I haven’t  done is actually seen the thing, though I’m trying to imagine it. Will it have racing stripes? Will it be painted fire engine red? Will it purr, as it moves, or will it spout poetry?

Anyway, I want to see it, but what I really wonder about, just now, is kintsugi.

“And that would be?” asked Lady, looking up from the little casita she is painting.

“It’s this Japanese thing, but it has all this mystical overtone to it. Anyway, instead of throwing away broken pottery, as any sensible civilization has done, they repair first with lacquer, and then with gold. In short, they embrace and emphasize the defect. Look, here’s an example:

                              

                

“Well, that’s completely no help to archeologists,” said Lady, who though being a poet does have a practical side. “What are they going to discover when they go digging?”

“I have no idea,” I told her. “But we’re always trying to seek perfection, and always failing. Does anyone have it all? The perfect spouse, the perfect house—sorry for all these rhymes….”

“The perfect louse, the perfect grouse, let’s see…there should be something else…”

“The perfect mouse,” I told her, “oh, and for you, the perfect blouse.”

“Wasn’t this supposed to be serious?” asked Lady. “Embracing your defects, or glorifying—or perhaps goldifying—your cracks. How many times have you been broken, Marc?”

I consider this: there are days I feel that I’ve never been anything but broken. Nor am I sure, somehow, that I’ve repaired well. Anyway, I definitely can’t afford to buy enough gold to fill in the cracks….

“You know,” I tell her, “I have half a mind to run over to Marshall’s, conveniently right across the street, and buy the most beautiful thing I can find. Then, I’ll sit in meditation until precisely the right moment. At that point, I’ll take a hammer, and deliver one swift blow. Or perhaps I’ll simply drop it—though there might be splinters in that case. Anyway, I’ll break the damn thing, and then collect the shards, one by one, and meditate over each one.”

“Do you know what you’d find?”

“Well, there are the obvious ones, of which sexuality is a major crack. Every time I see twenty year-old kids who are so freely gay, I remember how long it took me to get…well, nowhere near so far.”

“You think so?”

“They’re so free. They have no idea that there might be objection, that there might be a bottle thrown, or a fist. I grew up in a time of fag bashing, and I learned early on how to be straight acting. Not sure that was a good thing….”

“Why not?” asked Lady. “Anyway, do you want to act gay?”

“Not really,” I told her. “But I don’t particularly like having how I behave dictated by somebody else. One break, certainly, and it nearly killed me. In fact, there was one time when I thought that I would have to end my relationship with my parents. I figured it would be better if I just drifted off, and not call them or visit them. I thought they’d sort of forget about me….”

“Marc?”

“Well, it made sense at the time, though now it seems crazy. Then there was the cello, and that was wrenching—almost worse than being gay. Though I wonder, sometimes, if the two issues weren’t related, somehow.”

“What does being gay have to do with playing the cello?”

“Nothing, except that both are about finding and coming into peace with your own voice. You know, gay men my age spent a lot of time passing, a lot of time pretending to be something else. So when I sat down to the cello, I had to be Rostropovich or Starker, or something akin. I had all of these expectations, and I could never get the sounds I heard in my head out of the cello. It was agonizing; I used to get so frustrated, I would bite myself, and leave teeth marks in my forearm.”

“What!”

“Strange, hunh? You know, one of the things about Puerto Rico is how utterly natural the musicians are. Even students seem freer, easier than in the states. Maybe it has to do with how naturally people approach dance….”

“And then?”

I think to myself—what hasn’t broken? My spirit? Well, what’s depression? My professional life? My personal life?  Yes, they’ve all been fractured, at some point, even up to my back, which got broken six months ago.

“There may be something to it,” I tell her. “At any rate, it’s probably better to think that you have repaired yourself, made yourself stronger and more beautiful, and thus more valuable. Better that, than to think of yourself as still broken….”

But aren’t I?   

                                     

Garcia Marquez for Governor!

To say that the world has gone completely batty is putting it mildly, since whoever could imagine that the island’s mayors as well as cabinet department heads would—presumably tipped of by the governor—run out and establish bank accounts at Banco Popular, among others?

I bring you this news only after checking twice, and verifying twice, that the article Gobierno mueve su dinero del BGF, was published on the second day of April, not the first. Oh, and also reading an article saying that a group of bondholders are suing the government, saying that the move represents an attempt to shield funds.

The BGF is the government development bank—and is the bank which, generally speaking, receives and disburses funds. But now, according to El Nuevo Día, dozens of government agencies have established private bank accounts for their agencies.

Say what?

It’s a little hard to see—no wait, it’s completely impossible to see how this could happen. Did the department heads simply go to a branch, ask to speak to a personal banker, and then announce they were the head of an agency, and had a check for umpteen millions to deposit?

Obviously not. But wait—under what authority can a department head even do such a thing? Aren’t there clearly established rules about how funds can be disbursed or transferred? Clearly, the order came from above, and the department heads were told what to do. But wait—did they all, like sheep, just follow orders? Didn't someone question the propriety—or legality—of such a move?

OK—so Banco Popular now has a big chunk of the government’s money. Nice, right? But wait, the government is broke, and may be / will be / is being sued by the people it owes money to. And now Banco Popular has become in a sense the government bank. So will Banco Popular get dragged into litigation, too? Oh, and what about the conflict of interest between a private bank being regulated by the banking commission? Right—there was no conflict there, but isn't there one now?

And suppose the government goes broke—which is sort of like imagining dinner—what happens to Banco Popular? And what happens to my money—that’s $37.63, the last I checked. OK—not much to you, but very important to me, since money is strange: the less you have of it, the more you care about it.

Well, then there’s the other question—we currently have only three or four banks on the island, and Banco Popular is the biggest. So now, we have a really HUGE bank, and remember that little trouble we got into 8 years ago about “too big to fail?” And if Banco Popular is in trouble, and the government is broke, well, then what happens?

No problem for me, of course, since I check religiously every time I go to the bank, and breathe a sigh of relief onto the sign telling me that the FDIC has me covered for up to a million bucks per account. But that’s for a regular bank, and is Banco Popular still a regular bank? Or is it now a hybrid, or even the government bank?

So I was scratching my head over this, and then wondering—am I the only one who thinks this is just the slightest bit bizarre? Because nobody except those pesky and avaricious bondholders is uttering a peep. Oh, except for the students at the University of Puerto Rico, who are so totally OK with the idea that they are urging the university to move funds too….

We are at the point where the ideology is wagging the tongues and actions. Consider those awful bondholders—are they all avaricious not to say rapacious raptors? No, since I am probably one of them, since I invested in mutual funds when I worked in the corporate world. So how much would I lose, if Puerto Rico chose not to pay my mutual fund what it owes it, whenever whatever bond comes due?

Full disclosure—I haven’t the vaguest idea, because like most people, I chose the fund by:

1.     reading the full PDF file, writing notes on important topics, and approving of the sage investing strategy

2.     consulting with a financial advisor, peppering him with pertinent questions, and then choosing the most advantageous but yet conservative investment strategy

3.     looking at the logos, and deciding which made me feel better     

Must I tell you?

So according to the Money section of CNN, 30% of the total Puerto Rico debt is held by regular Puerto Ricans, who were told that the investment was a sure thing, and didn’t they want to help their country? And another 15% percent is held by regular guys like me who invested in mutual funds.  The rest is held by investment firms, of which some, yes, are vultures.

Well, now Banco Popular has somehow been chosen to receive the government money…but wait? Transparency? How did that deal go down? Because though I’ve never breathed a word of discontent to Richard Carrión on the two times I’ve met him, I am, well, just a little peeved with the bank. They charged me 25 bucks because I didn’t pay my Visa bill when I was lying in bed with a broken back! What bastards! So what are the fees going to be that Banco Popular is going to charge…. Oh, and why do I feel that I pay more quickly than the government?

So now I have a bald spot on the right side of my head, so hard have I been scratching it, and then in a race to outdo the absurdity, the legislature has just signed a bill allowing the governor to declare a moratorium on payment of debt, if he deems it necessary. But is that it? Doesn't it make more sense to require the head of the government bank and the head of the treasury to submit reports testifying that the payment of debt will lead to a specified depletion of funds, and that they (the department heads) sign off on the moratorium? And as if that’s not bad enough, the law gives the governor…wait, let me quote directly from El Nuevo Día:

El proyecto de “Ley de Moratoria de Emergencia y Rehabilitación Financiera de Puerto Rico” le otorgaría múltiples poderes al gobernador Alejandro García Padilla, absolutos y unilaterales, entre ellos la opción de expropiar propiedades a empresas privadas que se nieguen a continuar prestándole servicios al Gobierno durante una declaración de emergencia.

OK—this gives the governor the power to expropriate properties from businesses that decline to continue to give services to the government during an emergency.

Which sounds all well and good, but I might suggest to my doctor to think twice before she tells the government that she won’t keep seeing the government’s patients (since 45% of the population is at poverty level or below, can you guess how many people are enrolled in La Salud)? But if the government isn’t paying her, why should she keep seeing those patients? And will my copay go up three or four times to cover her losses?

So now she has to keep seeing the patients, or have her office expropriated…and I am definitely NOT going to want to be in the waiting room when that happens. Oh, and by the way, I have in the past been charmed at the idea of offering my blogging services to the government, but now? I ask you not for myself or Mr. Fernández, but what about the cats? Are they too to be thrown into the street?

Well, the senate passed the law at just before 3 in the morning, and that’s strange because I have a policy: whatever I’m thinking in the middle of the night will not seem so horrible or necessary in the warm light of morning. Three in the morning, in short, is a lousy time to think about anything. But now the house of represntatives has gone along, and the bill has been signed by the governor—no surprise there!—so a word to any suppliers out there? Tiptoe away from any business with the government, before it declares an emergency!

So now I have two bald spots, but at least it’s symmetrical, since I decided due to the sinister nature of the second affair to switch over to my left side. But why is it that no one seems to be worrying about all this? Or are the social media erupting in roars? Well, I ran over to Facebook and there was nothing but the picture of a wild turkey walking the streets of Madison, WI. Oh, and then the startling this:

WHAT!

Mr. Fernández, who got bumped from Facebook after posting a festive picture of the three Magi with magnificent erections and has had to hide behind the skirts of a dead (though beloved) cat…Mr. Fernández is cheerful? Look, I love him enough to have married him, and I’d do it again, but…

…cheerful?

I can only think that he had a three-martini lunch before he took the test, but at least it provided me with the first merriment of the day. Oh, but wait!

There’s this!

Shades of My Father

“I see absolutely no reason to get down to work, today, even if it is Monday, and even if I did absolutely nothing all weekend….”

“Nonsense,” Lady snorted, “I’m painting houses, Naïa is in school, so you should be writing.”

“Why me?” I asked. “Look at my father! Just see how he was spending some Monday morning in ‘date unknown.’”

“Date unknown?”

“Date unknown, since when my father retired in 1974, he had to clean out the basement, partly to keep busy, and partly because they were going to move. So we had this massive garage sale, and then it came time to do something with the thousands of pictures that he had taken over the years….”

“He was a photographer? I though he was a writer.”

“Well, he was mostly a writer, but in his quirky way, he branched into oddities. I mean, who would have thought he would turn into an excellent Chinese cook? So he had all these Leicas—very expensive at time, and still are—and he kept them hidden from my mother. And there we all were, eating 29 cent tuna fish, and he was spending hundreds on cameras!”

“Then what happened?”

“Well, that went on for years, under the pretense that he had only one Leica, which really was a working tool. And that worked perfectly well, since at that time all cameras were black. So Franny, my mom, really had no way of knowing how many cameras her husband had. And by the time she found out, the kids had grown, and they didn’t need to eat tuna fish anymore….”

“Anyway, Jack would take the camera along with him as he went to do his stories, which saved the paper a bundle of money. So over the weekend, I began wondering whether my father had gotten up to see Mary Ann van Hoof, also known as the Blessed Mother. You remember—the lady who palled around with the Blessed Virgin Mary. BM and BVM respectively, since I’m lazy today.”

“Ah yes, 100,000 people in some weird little town in Wisconsin.”

“Necedah. And you’re seriously right about it being weird; it’s in a totally terrible part of Wisconsin. Actually, the place is so bad that the Indian’s named one of the towns up there Wonewoc, which means ‘evil / bad.’”

“Yeah?”

“Yup—a terrible place. So bad the Mafia used to get rid of their corpses up there. Sand country, dirt poor, butt-ugly. Nothing good about it….”

“Well, until the BVM dropped by….”

“Anyway, the place has a long history of weirdoes, one of whom was Elizabeth Bieber, who was Mary Ann’s mother. So Elizabeth was a spiritualist, who gave séances in Kenosha, and then drifted over to Wonewoc to do the same in the Spiritist Camp.”

“You got spiritualists in Wisconsin?”

“Every crazy seems to spend some time in Wisconsin,” I told her. “And yes, there’s been a spiritualist camp up in Wonewoc ever since 1887, or something. You know, it was big in the late 19^th century. Even Abraham Lincoln and Mary Todd were having séances in the White House….”

“Yeah?”

“Anyway, the point is that Jack thrived on oddballs. He used to worry, occasionally, that everybody would get up in Southern Wisconsin and just go to work, which makes economists happy, but not newspaper guys. So if you were building a replica of Noah’s arc in your basement, according to the exact specifications of the Old Testament—well, my father was your best friend.”

“So this is leading up to….”

“Here,” I showed her.

“Good Lord,” said Lady. “And what are they doing?”

“Well, according to the Hysterical Society—which is actually pretty apt, in this case—they were ‘testing’ a medium, these two ladies up in Wonewoc.”

“Thank god for that,” said Lady. “Because otherwise, it would seem to be a bondage session gone west…. Oh, and the Hysterical Society?”

“That’s where all my father’s pictures ended up. He would take photos, you see, and then write something on the back of them, and then put them in a cardboard box down in the basement. And eventually, of course, it would turn out to be a lot of boxes, and a lot of negatives, and a lot of newspaper clippings—in short, a huge mess. Which made my mother unhappy and made the Wisconsin State Historical Society really happy. Archivists love this sort of stuff, which is why I can tell you that the image is number 60311, and the dimensions are 4x5 inches in the original. But if, by the way, you want to buy a 24x 36 inch print, it cost you 77 bucks….”

“What! They’re selling your father’s pictures!”

“They certainly are,” I told her. “And do you think anyone in the family is seeing a nickel of that money? Hah—they’re all probably skiing in Gstaad, or buying Greek islands! And here I am, back to the tuna fish, lately….”

“Yes, lying flat on your back does tend to limit—generally speaking—career opportunities.”

“So the point is that if Jack could spend some morning breezing up to Wonewoc to check in with the spiritualists, well, what about me? I definitely get a day at the beach at least once a year…”

“Nonsense—your father was on duty.”

“My father had a surprisingly lax sense of duty,” I told her. “Which tended to drive the bosses crazy. I mean, he would drift into the office, sit down and type non-stop, then get up, and drift away. He had been writing, you see, in his head, during his nap after breakfast….”

“The guy took a nap after breakfast?”

“Not only can I still see him, I can hear him. A prodigious snorer. Anyway, then he would get up, and drive slowly downtown. And as he kept writing—internally—the driving got slower and slower. People either loved him or hated him, though he did provide the perfect excuse for office tardiness. ‘I was behind John Newhouse,’ you’d tell your boss, and all he could do was nod….”

“Well, he couldn’t have been all that lax, since he took all those pictures, and wrote all those stories….”

“The problem was that it looked like he wasn’t doing anything,” I told her. “I mean, he’d be drinking coffee or looking out the window or just generally goofing off, and nobody knew that he was writing. And that tends to annoy the supervisorial mind….”

“I can understand,” said Lady. “And what do you think the story is behind the picture? Did the medium pass the test? And what did they intend to do—or what had they done?—with that rope?”

“No idea,” I told her. “But there is something troublesome about Jack. Most people, when they die, just stop. No more stories, nothing more to learn. But with my father, he keeps cropping up, in places. So what he was doing, on that date unknown, in Wonewoc, Wisconsin, we’ll probably never know. You know, we really should have taken him a bit more seriously—like the Hysterical Society—and sat him down with a tape recorder and gotten him to tell us about all these pictures. As it is, they just breeze in, occasionally, on the Internet.”

But Lady has drifted off somewhere, since houses need to be painted or children sent to school, and then—having a Frenchman for a husband—she has to kiss Nico. I ponder it: the stories were supposed to have ended, when my parents died. And that seemed fine, and then I fell, and now?

Have the stories begun again?    

The Blessed Mother of Necedah

“As always, I have no idea what I’m doing, nor do I know why. But all of a sudden, all these memories are coming up. My father, the bomb shelter, the fire rope,and now my high school friend Joan. You don’t suppose the fall is causing some sort of frontal lobe epilepsy, do you?”

“No clue,” said Lady. “But anyway, why don’t you go with the flow? You’re writing again, at least….”

“It’s strange. One day I can write, and the next day, no. So I try to write, and it comes out sterile and boring. And if I’m bored, can you imagine the reader?”

“Well, who can be bored with a character like Mary Ann van Hoof,” said Lady. “And are you serious about this woman, Marc?”

“Well, you click on the link, and tell me if it’s true,” I told her. “Though I never really met her. Anyway, by the time I came along she was quite old, and quite feeble, and everything about the place seemed….well, as if it was just hanging on. I mean, you could tell that there had been a time when the furniture and the furnishing had been expensive. But by the early seventies, everything was old and dated and sort of seedy. Think a religious version of the Bates Motel. And the grounds, of course, were just plain crazy.”

“How so,” asked Lady.

“Well, the Blessed Mother, as they called van Hoof, had had all these visitations from the BVM. But canny woman that she was—or perhaps canny women that they were—and the BM and the BVM conflated patriotism with religion. So it turned out that the BVM had been helping George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. So to commemorate that, well, take a look….”

“Jesus, Marc,” said Lady, “that has to be the ugliest set of statues I’ve ever seen.”

“Artistic merit be damned,” I told her. “Can’t you see that it’s a teaching moment, this statue? And notice what country on the globe is right smack under the raised right hand of Jesus? Yes, the Blessed Mother and gotten the message: the BVM had been a good egg in the past, when things were righteous and on the up and up. But now, well, here’s a sample, lifted from the website:

Our Holy Mother often appeared to Mary Ann Van Hoof with the plea of “Wake Up America”.  Holy Mother begs mankind to fight the evils that have crept into our country; and, to stand for the truth and love of God.  Any change for the good of our Country can only come through prayer; a Constant Vigil of Prayer as she requested.  So many evils and sins are being accepted in our laws, that this is no longer America the Beautiful.  Can we truly ask of God to Bless America, if we don’t take a stand and fight?

“My goodness,” said Lady, “and when was all this decreed?”

“First in 1950,” I said. “But as things went to pot, the messages got increasingly strident. And guess what really got the Virgin going? Abortion, which even the pagans had not practiced.”

“So did anyone else hear the messages?”

“Well, no, but that was no problem, because the Blessed Mother had, so she was able to repeat everything the Virgin had told her? See?”

“Could this, by any chance, be the reason I have such a problem with religion,” asked Lady. “I mean, somehow this fails to impress, logically speaking….”

“I fear for your immortal soul,” I told her, “since anyone can see that we are, if anything, in even deeper trouble than we were in 1950. You would very likely not be among those appointed to board the spaceship with limited seating that will be sent to rescue the godly. Captain: Prince Joseph, with blue eyes and golden hair. Destination: Middle Earth.”

“You have got to be kidding. Anyway, you put your friend Joan into the hands of such loonies?”

“I didn’t,” I told her. “her mother did. Anyway, the Blessed Mother had started off legitimately enough, but then the Catholic Church got seriously peeved. There is something about seeing 100,000 people from forty states come to see the Virgin revealed, when your own parish churches are half-empty. Leaves a sour taste in the mouth….”

“So what happened?”

“Well, the church kept hoping that somehow, she’d go away. And so even though they said it was all hoooey from the get-go, they never took action. Sure, they said it was all bunkum, but it was her land. If she wanted to build shrines and put up statues, well, how could they stop her? A point she made quite frequently, by the way….”

“And then?”

“Well, by 1975, the church had finally had enough. And then, the bishop excommunicated and refused to give sacraments to anyone who, and I quote,

attended, participated, approved, associated with, contributed to, anything whatsoever associated with the Shrine at Necedah, whether pageants, prayer meetings, devotions, venerations, visits, meetings, classes, secret meetings, strategy meetings, seances, movies, books, or anything else, whether at the Shrine or away from it. 

“Wow, what about passing it along the road,” asked Lady.

“Dicey ground, theologically, though I suppose if you didn’t look at it….”

“Well, I still don’t know how you could put a daughter into such hands,” said Lady.

“Look, it was a different time, then. First of all, this was absolutely the worst thing that could happen to a mother. And not only was her daughter’s life going to be ruined, but the whole family would be ruined. And not just by the wagging tongues, but right in the pocketbook, since would you want to put your life in the hands of a doctor whose daughter….”

“What?”

“That’s how we thought back then. Though it was mostly the mother who got it. And so there was all this pressure, and every day that belly was getting just a bit bigger. And it was nicely out of town—Necedah is 100 miles or so away from Madison. And it had, somehow, still managed to be seen as a Catholic institution. So she sent me off to shepherd Joan into the orphanage, and that’s what I did.”

“But that poor girl,” cried Lady. “So the mother ditches her and leaves her in the hands of those lunatics?”

“Yes,” I told her. “And there was something else operating, though I didn’t know it at the time. But I’ve forgotten it now. I mean, I knew it at the time, I guess, but it’s all so long gone. Or have I imagined it? Whatever—it’s probably not important, since I don’t remember it, anyway.”

“There’s got to be something else,” said Lady fiercely. “No mother, not even in the 1970’s, would give up her daughter and grandchild just like that!”

“Yeah?” I asked her. “Then what about my two nieces, who were adopted by my brother from women in essentially the same circumstances, and in those years? Yes, there was a sexual revolution in the 60’s, but a lot of the country was untouched by it. And the old morality was still pretty fierce….”

“Well, I want to know what it is,” Lady said. “Think, Marc, you must know….”

Do I?