Valores intachables

Those were the words used by a colleague to describe federal judge Salvador Casellas.

Valores intachables—impeccable values. That’s Mr. Fernández’s translation. But I looked it up—una tacha is a blemish.

And what if it’s true? What if the judge possesses unblemished values?

Then it’s a Greek, not a Caribbean, tragedy.

And I’ve wronged the judge.

Well, he’s no lightweight. Born in 1935, got his law degree from Harvard in 1961, served in the army for two years, worked at Puerto Rico’s most prestigious law firm, was appointed federal judge in 1994, and senior judge in 2005.

Do the math. The man is in his late seventies, and has had a distinguished career. Only now does he have…

…una tacha.

Well, we were discussing him at the dinner table last night. And Raf, as always, has a twist on the events. Carmen, he thinks, wanted a divorce. Pablo was jealous. He sets up a carjacking, and one of the guns “stolen” was a rare weapon, called a “cop killer.”

Goes through bulletproof vests.

Oh, and by the way, that’s the type of weapon that dispatched Carmen.

So, goes the theory of Mr. Fernández, Carmen goes through with her plans. She leaves home briefly, but comes back because her daughter is distressed. She’s reading by the pool. Pablo comes out, shoots her between the eyebrow and in the left chest.

Then empties 14 or 15 more shots in her. 

He goes to the bathroom—where apparently the blood was detected. Takes a shower. Then goes to visit Daddy.

Who knows nothing.

Pablo acts normally—some guys can. Leaves after a while, and then comes home to see the “intruder” leaping the fence.

A ten-foot cyclone fence with razor wire on top and vegetation on both sides that is intact with no sign of trampling.

Pablo fires the shots needed to establish an alibi of discovering an intruder, goes inside and calls the police. Then Daddy.

Or maybe the reverse order.

Then, this honorable judge, who has worked and struggled a lifetime, makes the mistake that will cost him his reputation.

He goes to the crime scene.

Why?

He doesn’t trust the cops.

And he loves his son.

If it happened that way, if this honorable man instinctively knew that the cops would make a botch of it and raced to safeguard his son, then yes, it’s a tragedy.

Not a Greek, not a Puerto Rican tragedy.

A tragedy for us all.

Who Killed Carmen Paredes?

Disclaimers first: I came to this story late. I only got curious about it when I saw the photo clip of Senior Federal Judge Salvador Casellas observing the paramedics loading his daughter-in-law’s corpse into the ambulance.

First question—what was he doing there?

Well, the cops let him in.

Into a crime scene?

Second question—how did the daughter-in-law die?

What version do you want?

According to the son of the judge, Pablo Casellas, it all started with a carjacking near a shooting range. Pablo has a nice little collection of guns, and was off on Father’s Day to do a little practice. Only problem was that the range was closed.

OK, he reports the crime, and the missing guns. Then a couple weeks later, on the 14^th of July, Pablo goes to visit his father, the judge. Comes home at 9:40 in the morning, sees an intruder leaping from the roof of his garage, goes to get his gun, comes back and shoots, to no avail. Then discovers his wife dead by the side of the pool.

Well, the New Day (El Nuevo Día—our local rag) is now painting a different picture. According to the Day, the evidence is piling up against Pablo. The police noted signs even in their initial investigation that the victim, Carmen Paredes, had been shot earlier than 9:40, as Pablo said. Neighbors allege that they heard shots earlier, at 8:30 or so. There is evidence that Paredes was killed in a different part of the house, and that the scene had been cleaned. Pablo is filmed leaving his closed neighborhood at 9:14, not 8:30 as he stated. There are blood stains in Pablo’s BMW and on his clothes, both of which were confiscated from…

…the judge’s house.

Just a second….

Had to read that last long paragraph again. Why? Well, it beggars belief. And you know, the questions in my mind multiply.

First, what kind of guy goes running to his father after he murders his wife? What in God’s name must their relation be? And not for the first time I begin to appreciate Jack, my father. Why? Because the first thing he would have done, had I come fleeing home with blood on my hands?

Call the cops!

Second question? What kind of cop allows Daddy—even or perhaps especially if he is a federal judge—into a crime scene?

Third question—where’s the press? Go to Google, as I did. Type in Salvador Casellas. And you’ll get, yes, information in Spanish about these goings-on. Fine! In English? Not in the first five pages, which I scrolled through in disgust.

Fourth question—is this where Puerto Rico has come to? That almost a month after a woman was killed, her husband still has not been charged?

Oh, and the question I DON’T have?

Who killed Carmen Paredes?

The Worst Thing That Can Happen

Well, it’s not, of course. I mean, come on—I should know a thing or two about proportions. What have I lost in the last two years? My mother, my job, my mind.

Why do I think losing my cell phone is the worst tragedy?

Well it was there, and then it wasn’t. Happened two weeks ago, and I took desperate measures immediately.

Cleaned the house!

All right, just picked it up—there’s still dust everywhere. But that, sadly, was no help at all.

It’s not there.

Or rather, it’s not here. 

So maybe it was there. Internet café? Grocery store? Radio Shack, where I had gone to get new headphones? (Yeah, for a day I was without communication AND music!)

It’s neither here nor there.

Or rather, it’s not neither nor there. 

“I’d rather lose my wallet,” I said almost in tears to the kid at the café.

“Oh, I know,” he breathed. Short of cancer or AIDS, this plight evokes the maximum in hushed commiseration….

It’s not the phone—it’s the contact list.

For the phone, you see, is really nothing. It played a tune, I flipped it open, and somebody was there. Alternatively, I flipped it open, pressed contacts, keyed “R” and instantly came up with Raf.

Little beeping noises….

“Hey, waddya want for dinner?”

“I dunno, you decide.”

“Right, see you at six…”

And that was it.

So why do I miss it so much?

Because I don’t know Raf’s number. 

It’s actually a serious problem. Johnny told me the story of a friend who had her cell phone stolen. She was stuck, she needed to call someone, she needed money. People offered to lend her their phones but…

…whom to call? What number?

She finally recalled one number from her pre-cell phone days.

An ex-boyfriend.

Fortunately, they parted on good terms, or at least time had healed the wounds.

Fitting also that Johnny had told me the story, since he also got me into this mess. It drove him nuts, my refusal to join the rest of the world and get a cell phone. In utter exasperation at his Luddite brother, he dove into his closet and produced a cell phone. I offered to pay for it, he told me forget it. It was a family package, and his family is more nuclear than most.

Hey, a free cell phone!

Came in handy, too. I got to call Franny every morning and, at the end, most afternoons. I stuck in numbers into a contact list.

I once even texted!

Well, there it was—this little device that was such a dream when it was there, and such a nightmare when it went its separate way.

Well, I thought I was equal to this challenge. Google! So I typed in “where’s my cell phone?” And yes, you’ve got it….

wheresmycellphone.com

Well, why not? I tried it. Entered my number, then pressed the “make it ring!” button. Then went scurrying around my house, hoping to hear that familiar song.

And the only time that silence was not welcome?

Right. It’s gone. I’ll have to get a new one. I’m age 55, not poor, not rich. It’s time to join the rest of the world.

Oh, by the way—what’s your number?

Invasion

Well, they’ve done it again. Now the iguanas are moving from the mangroves to the newspapers. The New Day (El Nuevo Día), our local newspaper, reports that scientists are unsure about the effect of the swarming population of iguanas. Do they harm fauna / flora or are they just a nuisance, visually speaking? (The author of the article describes them iguanas as feas—ugly. Well, has anyone ever asked them what they think of us?)

The real question, he goes on to say, is what they eat. The answer, most people say, is that they are herbivores. Great—let them eat grass.

But wait—they have been seen to eat eggs. 

Presumably scrambled, though not cooked.

So now the question vexing scientific minds is how often? So guess what they did!

Trapped 'em and cut into their stomach!

Guys!

Look, what did the iguana ever do to you? 

I think of the story I read, once, of two African safari expeditions encountering each other. They’re both observing the giraffes, but in rather different ways. The Americans are getting as close as they dare, and snapping away with cameras. The British expedition is drinking tea and observing them from a distance. The British leader of the expedition can contain himself no longer.

“It’s so bloody disrespectful to the animals!”  

Good point.

Well, the news is that with one exception the gastrointestinal content of eviscerated iguanas contain only plant matter.

The exception?

Lapas.

Hunh?

OK, another word I don’t know. Turns out that lapas are limpets.

Hunh again….

And limpets, it turns out, are mollusks which stick tenaciously to ships. 

Oh!

Well, there is something fishy (hope you didn’t notice that) here. Are there limpets in Puerto Rico? Or is this one more case of a Spanish word that means various things, depending on region? (One local hotel is named La Concha—the conch. But Venezuelans, when they spot it, go into gales of laughter, and the men take salacious pictures of themselves in front of the sign. In Caracas, the conch is the nether region of ladies….)

Wasn’t I speaking of iguanas?

Right. Well, I looked it up—the iguanas, I mean. And it turns out I had it all wrong! I had written that there are two species of iguanas, the greater and the lesser. Now I find that there are many more species of iguanas, including our very own Mona Island Iguana, which inhabits, very properly, Mona Island, midway between Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic.

I’ll save you the trouble of looking it up….

Wow! An iguana wearing camouflage! Often called the rhinoceros iguana, because of the bump on its nose. Here, you see it better.

Well, this iguana bears the name Cyclura cornuta stejnegeri.

Stejnegeri?

Well, one of the nice things about NOT using the computer to cruise Internet porn sites is that you have time to look things up. So who was Stejneger?

A Norwegian! Born in Bergen, emigrated to the states, worked in New York, and came to Puerto Rico. Discovered the Cyclura cornuta and stuck it in his book, the classic Herpetology of Porto Rico.

Yup, that’s Porto Rico. The gringos changed our name when they invaded us.

So of course I had to read about Stejneger. But really, what stuck with me most was not the biography but the image. Here he is….

Looking at it, one imagines him dressed just as above on the searingly hot island of Mona. And would he be trapping the Cyclura cornuta? And cutting into their stomachs?

No way!

It’s so bloody disrespectful….

Music Torture

Anybody remember Noriega?

Dictator of Panama, taken out by the US army on 3 January 1990. After being blasted for three days by hard core, heavy metal music—including, of all things Van Halen’s song Panama.

Which is what happened to me this weekend. Only in this case it wasn’t an army.

It was a pizzeria.

And a very good one, as I cordially told the owner on Friday night.

OK, I’ll tell the story straight. Puerto Rico has a number of good restaurants, and wants to crack into the food tourism industry. Yes, it exists. People apparently travel just to eat. Well, why shouldn’t they?

And many of the restaurants are on my street: Calle Fortaleza. And so the idea of a festival sprung up. Called neither very originally or accurately the SoFo Fest—Fortaleza runs east  / west, so it should be WeFo—it was a success.

And I liked it…

…in the beginning.

People sat outside talking, laughing, eating good food. Music, too. Guys with guitars, people singing trios from the fifties, an occasional bomba y plena. Nice!

But year after year, the music got louder. 

And this year it was insufferable. 

On Friday, I could bear it no longer. I went into the pizzeria, asked to speak to the owner, gave him my hand, introduced myself. I told him where I lived. I told him I had eaten his pizza, and that it was excellent. Then I told him the music was too loud.

He turned it down after the song had stopped.

Great!

The next night, the music was just as loud. 

I was furious. And became more so when I went—again—to talk to the owner. 

I saw a cop, dressed all in black, listening to the music.

“¿No tenemos un código de orden público?”

Yes, I was screaming. You had to, to be heard.

I addressed him as caballero, a term of respect in Puerto Rico. I begged him to come into my apartment, to hear for himself how loud it was.

He placed his hand on my chest.

I was stunned, but had the sense to walk away.

Hardly police brutality. Black guys in Washington DC get it a lot worse. It wasn’t a nightstick rammed up my ass.

It was also the first time I’ve been touched by a cop.

“I AM LEAVING THIS PLACE—I CANNOT LIVE HERE!”

That’s what I yelled at Raf.

Whose nerves were also on edge. Se we had a fight. And I woke on Sunday not sure whether I was going to book a one-way ticket to Chicago.

I took a walk instead. And I’ve taken a walk today. 

Years ago, when I worked on a psychiatry unit on the night shift, we had a patient that everybody dreaded—very big, very violent, very unpredictable. There were three of us working: two older women, and I. Guess who got to deal with him?

Nothing happened—not even a hand on a chest. But I went home shaking with fear, tossed in bed for several hours, got up and…

…took a walk.

(I may be revealing some coping strategies in this post.)

It helped somewhat, but my hands were still shaky, for the rest of the day.

I tell you this because today, I can barely type.

And I tell you this whole story because I’m tired of being the outsider, being the different one, being always in the wrong place. You know, I’m a white guy, but I swear I would change race and sex, were it possible to do so. That’s how apparently ardent I am to be different.

And I thought I had come to terms with it. Yeah, it gives me insights that the crowd, the sheeple (as the British call it) don’t have. But I’m about to type—if I can—the two words I despise the most in the world:

Why me?

If you’ve come this far—and you’re crazy if you have—you deserve something sweet. So here it is, an absolutely gorgeous song by Vaughan Williams, sung by David Daniels, the foremost counter tenor of our time….

This from your friends at Wikipedia:

The United Nations and the European Court of Human Rights have banned the use of loud music in interrogations, but it is still being widely used. The term torture is sometimes used to describe the practice. While it is acknowledged by US interrogation experts that it causes discomfort, it has also been characterized by them as causing no "long term effects."[1]

Yeah?

What about divorce?

Orpheus with his Lute Made Trees
 
Orpheus with his lute made trees,
And the mountain tops that freeze,
Bow themselves, when he did sing:
To his music plants and flowers
Ever sprung; as sun and showers
There had made a lasting spring.

Everything that heard him play,
Even the billows of the sea,
Hung their heads, and then lay by.
In sweet music is such art,
Killing care and grief of heart
Fall asleep, or hearing, die.

William Shakespeare

30,000 Lives

That’s how many people—more or less—die from gunshot wounds every year.

OK, be fair. A surprising number—over fifty percent—are suicides. Some are mishaps / accidents. Maybe forty-five percent are homicides.

Does it matter? Only ten thousand people murdered; hey—that’s nothing! 

Yeah? Every September 11^th, we all gather and recite three thousand names. Yet ten times as many people die every year from guns! And does it make a difference whether it’s you or someone else who pulls the trigger?

It’s a life lost.

I know a bit about that. I’ve had a brother scream at me, so concerned was he about my own planned death. And in my last trip to Chicago, I entered the seedy hotel where I bunked over, in my journeys from Wisconsin to Puerto Rico.

And discovered the manager, shaking, and calling 911.

The housekeeper had discovered the body.

She came out, a moment later, to smoke a cigarette and watch them collect the body. The paramedics came out, got the gurney from the back of the ambulance, entered the hotel. Sixty seconds later, they came out.

Everything—head included—covered by a sheet.

They returned with the gurney to the hotel. And came back with two suitcases, uncovered.

Took less than five minutes.

“He killed himself,” said the housekeeper. “So young, just 33 years old….”

One down—29, 999 to go?

“It’s surprisingly hard to kill yourself,” I wrote elsewhere. And I thought at the time of the decade I spent as a psychiatric nurse. Borderlines would come whimpering to show us the scratches they had carved on their wrist.

“Oh, let me get you some hydrogen peroxide to wash that off,” I’d say. “And would you like a Band-Aid?”

It’s anatomically almost impossible to slit your wrists deeply enough to hit the artery….

Tylenol? Curiously, for most people, nothing happens for the first 24 hours after ingestion.

“Just take a seat, Hon, I gotta see to this ingrown toenail….” a friend in the ER used to say, when the lost girls with their teddy bears arrived, empty Tylenol bottle in hand.

But a gun?

That’s serious. 

OK—sharp turn here. In a recent development, the University of Colorado psychiatrist who had been treating James Holmes warned the university that he posed a risk.

Did she warn the city?

And the university did nothing, since Holmes dropped out. 

Did he stop being a risk?

And does Colorado have a mental health background check?

It’s madness beyond words. 

Here’s what I’m gonna do.

I’m gonna start a petition on Signon.org . I’m gonna ask for thirty thousand signatures. Then, I’m gonna sit in the coffee shop that has now become my office and read them. I’ll film it, and put it on YouTube.

Any idea how long it’ll take?

Why Bother?

I don’t get it.

Well, nothing new there. There’s a lot of stuff I don’t get. But this has bothered me for most of my life. Why are people into sports?

What’s the point?

OK, Mr. Fernández came home, switched on the telly—for unknown reasons he’s feeling particularly British these days—and there they were. Gymnasts! And none of them lacking in muscular development….

Right, put down the Sudoku. Watched intently. The Chinese, predictably, were amazing. (Did they invent the sport? Feels like it….). A Japanese kid sailed smashingly onto his knees, walked to the sidelines, then started to hop. Interesting how strongly culture reigns behavior.

Amazing what they could do—hop, flip, twist, suspend, rotate, swivel. And clearly, they didn’t take this all up twenty minutes ago. Add all of the hours of all of the athletes spent in practice and you’d have years, if not decades.

What for?

Disclosure time—I spent years of my own life as a sort of athlete. I was a cellist. And I’ll freely admit, it didn’t do anybody much good either.

And it was a musical analogy that I thought of, yesterday. Seeing all of these amazing gymnastics was exactly like hearing a master pianist—Serkin, for example—play…

…scales.

Well, apparently people want to see it. The crowd was going wild. OK, not soccer-fan wild—there were no riots or fistfights. There also weren’t any empty seats. We’re in the grips of Olympic mania.

Now here more than Puerto Rico. After the opening ceremony, all three papers had headlines screaming about orgullo boricua and pro patria.

What for?

For carrying a flag into a stadium? For being—in the eyes of the Olympic Committee—an entity to ourselves? Sure, we were in the club with the big guys—Russia, China, the US. But also the little guys—the Marshall Islands, Samoa, Mauritania….

So why is it, I wondered, that people spend inordinate amounts of time training their bodies, just to do silly things on bar or ropes? They could put easily the same amount of effort and discipline, and do ballet.

And that made me think of the question Alfredo, Raf’s first lover, posed me.

“What’s the one moment in ballet that has most impressed you?”

Finally a question I can answer!

Concerto Barocco, second movement.

He knew immediately.

“The lift,” he said.

I was eighteen, alone in Boston, friendless. And yes, practicing and struggling. I went to see the Boston Ballet in an old movie theater in the city’s red light district. The first movement—lovely. The second movement?

I swear, the moment the male dancer lifted that ballerina—the crowd gasped. The theater breathed.

Something got changed in all of us.

Call me elitist. Say I’m a snob. There’s a difference between a C Sharp minor scale and a late Beethoven Sonata. There’s a difference between art and gymnastics.

Before I die

Well, she’s a talented lady, our Candy Chang.

Inventive too. Also fecund. Go onto her web page, and you’ll see (http://www.candychang.com).

And she fills me with envy! Why can’t I think of stuff like that? She’s out there in the community doing these goofy projects, but they’re wonderful. She’s stenciling “this would be a nice place for a tree” on barren sidewalks—tremendous idea, one we could use in Puerto Rico, which has major tree phobia.

Or what about putting the little red and white adhesive name tags—the kind that say “Hello! My name is _______”—on abandoned buildings? Only hers say “I wish this was a __________.”

But my favorite?

Before I die.

Here’s a building I’ve actually seen.

Unless I’m wrong, it’s Fredericksburg, St. Croix. But following Candy’s lead in New Orleans (where the project started), it became this.

 

What’s the big idea?

Well, Candy suffered a personal loss—know that one!—and decided that most people don’t think about the important stuff. What, she wondered, do I want to do or see before I die? And why did it take a major loss to force her to the question?

Shouldn’t we all be thinking that?

So she created a stencil—wow, that girl is a dab hand (hi, Franny!)—with the E-xacto knife! 

As you can see, it took off.

And it comes in Spanish, too!

It’s totally neat. 

So here’s what I’m gonna do. I’m gonna send this to my friend Sonia (Nick has an abandoned house in Old San Juan) with the message…

…Let’s do it!

Oh, and my three wishes?

1.     finally see Harry.

2.     watch Helen Mirren in the role of Franny in the film version of Life, Death and Iguanas.

3.     attend the trial in the Hague of George W. Bush for crimes against humanity!

Sidewalk Psychiatry

Well, of course somebody would think of it.

 

Ever wanted to step on your psychiatrist?

At least it's free….

http://candychang.com/sidewalk-psychiatry/

In Angustii

Well, Jack was bugging me, so I had to do it.

I had written about that sociopathic piece of music, the Grosse Fuge. And thrown in “And this, from a student of Haydn?”

That wasn’t right.

And Jack didn’t approve. So I struggled with him for a while. I mean, hey—how many people read this blog? How big is Haydn’s reputation, next to mine? And if we were gonna worry about anybody, shouldn’t it be Beethoven?

Not right.

Damn it. Look, Jack—and by the way, aren’t you dead?—it’s not that big a deal. And Haydn himself was famously a nice guy. Gracious. Good. One of his contemporaries called him the embodiment of Enlightenment's ideal of the honest man. (OK—give in to temptation, haul out the French. L’homme honnête! Now that’s class….) So he probably wouldn’t mind.

Marc.

Shit, am I ever gonna be free of you! I’m 56 years old, and you’re still able to say my name—Marc, and note the lack of exclamation mark! You had the quietest voice and, somehow, when you spoke, the heavens moved. Dammit—go putter in the garage. Build something. Stop bugging me—I haven’t defamed Franz Joseph Haydn.

Guess the response!

So I dug it out, the Lord Nelson Mass. Oh, hell, we’ll do the Latin (also classy): Missa in Angustii. Haven’t heard it in years, though I once played it for Raf, and argued it was a more sincere, more—well—honest work than Mozart’s Great Mass. Why not hear it again?

It’s amazing.

Also proof that the old can pull a surprise or two. It’s certainly traditional in content—the text follows the traditional Latin Mass. But wow—what the guy does, from the very first notes!

It’s pure terror.

OK, I enjoyed it enormously. Perfect music for a morning trot. Came home and looked it up. And discovered that, as usual, I’m not particularly original.

Everybody else thinks so too.

Well, that damn father of mine wouldn’t let me rest. He put me to read the whole article: here’s the skinny. The mass was written in that period when Napoleon was very near to conquering Europe. Austria was on edge, nerves were frayed. Haydn composed the work not knowing—no one did—that Napoleon had been defeated, and called it Missa in Angustii. A mass for troubled times, is sometimes the translation. But why not do the simpler thing?

A Mass in Anguished Times.

And was that enough for the old man?

NO! Then I had to download The Creation from Amazon—and pay 18 bucks as well—AND I had to read the biography of Haydn in Wikipedia.

OK—and are you listening, Jack?—here it is. Father is a barrel maker—or something, can’t remember. Mother was a servant. Musical family. Haydn at age six is sent to a relative to live and to develop himself as a musician. This the relative enables him to do, though he also doesn’t feed the child very well. Haydn serves as a choirboy until his voice changes. Actually, after. The empress complained that he sounded like a cow.

Thirty years in the employ of the Esterhazy family. Isolation for much of that time. And yes, he wore livery and did chores. Also composed like a fiend.

Had a completely unhappy marriage, which of course at the time he could not dissolve. So both he and his wife took lovers.

Several trips to London. Return  to Vienna. Teaches Beethoven, who predictably (and metaphorically) bit the hand that was trying to feed him. Composes the Creation over three years at the very end of the 18^th century.

Well, I listened to the first and part of the second sections.

And—you can guess this, right?—it’s friggin’ A.

And here again, he starts out with an amazing section of the chaos—the void before God filled the world. Full of dissonance, completely surprising.

Well the old man was right, as old men often are. The old Haydn reveals himself as something completely new. And my dead Jack is true to life—a fair guy who wants his kids to do the right thing.

Now will you go away?