Anybody Out There Got Twenty Grand?

On an island where the improbable happens more often than the probable, it made perfect sense: they were, after all, just across the street from Plaza las Américas (“the largest shopping mall in the Caribbean”, as it never stops telling us.) And everyone knows that Plaza has an excellent air conditioning system, with enough capacity to cool the place down to about thirty degrees in ten minutes. So why shouldn’t the 4000 members of the Unión de Trabajadores de la Industria Eléctrica y Riego (UTIER) just saunter over to the mall to have a little protest? They had, after all, just voted to strike.

To those who don’t know, UTIER is the union representing the workers who run the island’s power company. OK—so why are they striking? Because the legislature has voted and the governor has signed a budget that—while still 100 million dollars short—is being declared “balanced.”

Caveat—I’m swimming in two deep waters here, the first being Spanish, and the second being economics. In fact, “swimming” implies considerably more adeptness than I have: “struggling to tread water” is more like it. I can, however, use a calculator. But first, consider this statement:

La deuda del Estado Libre Asociado y sus corporaciones públicas alcanza la cifra de $71 billones de dólares, producto de décadas de decisiones que ponen primero los intereses de los acreedores. La deuda es tan grande que ya supera el tamaño de nuestra economía.*

(“The Commonwealth of Puerto Rico and its public agencies’ debt has reached the sum of 71 billion dollars, the product of decades of decisions which put the interest of the creditors first. The debt is so large that it now is greater than the size of our economy.”)*

OK—so we owe “71 billion”. And how many of us are there? Here’s your answer:

La población total de la isla bajó de unos 3,7 millones en 2010 a 3,6 millones en 2013. Las mayores bajas se registraron en San Juan y en el oeste y sur de la isla.

(“The population of Puerto Rico dropped from 3.7 million in 2010 to 3.6 million in 2013. The greatest drops were registered in San Juan and the west and south of the island.”)

So the question of the hour: how much would each of us—man, woman, child, infant—have to pay to pay off the debt tomorrow?

Well, let’s make it simple: let’s say that the debt is “only” 70 billion, and that the population has further dropped to 3.5 million. So how much is it?

Twenty thousand bucks.

Guys—would you buy a bond issued by a government so heavily in debt?

Well, if you said yes, you are considerably more rosy-eyed than the three companies who make it their business to advise investors about such things, since earlier in the year, all three of them reduced out bond ratings to junk status. And so we headed off from being La Isla del Encanto and became La Isla de la Deuda—and yes, that means what you think it means.

Enter the 242,000 people who are “working” for the government—and anyone who has tried to get service from our government knows haw richly justified those quotes are. The governor has promised to not cut jobs, but asked that the public unions make concessions about fringe benefits and payment for sick leave. The unions—reputedly—said yes, but wanted the governor to include language that would reinstate the benefits, once the crisis is over. This, the governor was unwilling to do.

And so, yesterday, the water utility and the power company decided to strike. OK, what have they vowed to do? Well, borrowing a page from the legislature, they’ve resolved to act in secret, as well as at night. Oh, and they’ve vowed to close off the airport, major shopping centers, and also Old San Juan. So what happens if my aging mother-in-law suffers a fall? Will we have to medevac her out?

Oh, and what is this going to do to our economy? Well, here’s one economist:

Una paralización en los servicios públicos como energía eléctrica, el agua, el Banco Gubernamental de Fomento y corporaciones públicas que ya están en situación económica y financiera delicada, esto le puede dar el golpe de muerte a las mismas”. 

(“A paralysis in public services such as power and light, the Government Development Bank and public corporations which now are in delicate economic and financial health could be the death blow for these agencies.”)

Absolutely possible, because what did the head of UTIER advise listeners to do, this morning on WKAQ Radio? Stop paying the light and the water bills!

The announcer stopped to scratch his head.

“OK—so what happens when they come to cut the service?”

Guess what? The answer should be obvious.

“Who’s going to come to cut your service? Not us!”

See? 

_____________

* The author of the first piece cited above uses the term “71 billion” the US way. In fact, the debt is named at 71,000 million dollars (which in Spanish would be termed 71 millardos and is 1,000 times less than 71 billion.)

A Blogger Proposes Marriage

As proof of our suitability to marry, I bring you the following dialogue, ten days ago:

Raf: Did you hear about Wisconsin?

Marc: Period Garden Park?

Raf: Absolutely!

I admit it, as a child I used to wonder at my parents, who could telescope an entire conversation into about six words. Now I totally get it, because who needs to do the whole thing, which would be:

Raf: Did you hear about Wisconsin?

Marc: Yeah, isn’t that great? You think there’s a federal judge out there who’s willing to support a same-sex ban?

Raf: Nah…

Marc: Hey, wanna get married in the Period Garden Park?

Raf: Absolutely!

OK—it’s happening so fast that you may have missed it, since the accurate headline would run, “Ho-hum, Another Federal Judge Strikes Down Same-Sex Marriage Ban.” But a Friday or two ago, Judge Barbara Crabb joined the parade, and issued her ruling. And she slung a few, rather crabby—sorry, had to—remarks to all those who believe in “traditional” marriage. She pointed out that, for most of humankind, marriage ha been between one man and multiple women, and was that where we wanted to revisit?

Undoubtedly, the judge had been reading this blog—I think that’s totally neat, and sorry, Judge, for poking fun at your name. (I know what that’s like, since I’ve spent a lifetime being called Marc Outhouse…)

At any rate, the judge ruled on a Friday afternoon, and then some neat stuff happened. There were the two guys who told the waitress in the pizzeria that they had just gotten married. So she told the boss, who promptly said that the food was on the house. That, of course, went viral—definitely good business move. Note—get ready for the Westboro Baptist Church, guys!

Then there was the county clerk of Milwaukee, who decided to open the clerk’s office on Saturday, a day it would normally be closed. So—this being Wisconsin—he paid for the whole thing out of his own pocket. And what’s happened to him now? He got slapped with a lawsuit, which is causing him, he says, no loss of sleep.

The predictable happened, meaning that 555 or some such number same-sex marriages took place, and then another federal judge put a stay on the ruling. So now the Wisconsin couples are in legal limbo, as are couples in various other states, including Utah and Michigan.

So, Dear Reader, you’re all invited to the Period Garden Park, on the second Saturday of June, 2015 to witness the consummation of what we started thirty-two years ago. That is…

Mr. Fernández, will you marry me?

(Here's what's NOT gonna happen!!!)

Voices Past and Present

Hunh?

He showed up last night, wanting to do some writing, and did take the computer out of the case. And it may be true that I derailed him, since I mentioned that it might be a plan to both force himself to write in specific meters and forms, and—at different times—abandon them.

Montalvo looked at me blankly.

So I tried to explain, citing Shakespeare and iambic pentameter.

“I’ve never read Shakespeare,” he said.

“You did go to high school?”

It turns out he did, and slid by, somehow, on the grease of a good intellect. Nice, but where could he be if the good intellect had been shored up by a good education?

Is it time for a jeremiad?

My grandmother knew more poetry than anyone I knew, and could still recite reams of the stuff when she was quite old; in the clip below, which she recorded in her eighties, she’s reciting from memory.

“Every Friday afternoon we had elocution,” said Gram. “And all the little children would stand up straight in front of the class, and start off on all the old chestnuts. It was ‘The boy stood on the burning deck, whence all but he had fled.’ Or it could have been ‘Captain, my captain!’ Then of course the was the spreading chestnut tree….”

Nor was it a bad idea—is anybody memorizing anything anymore?   

The answer, I discovered years ago, is yes, since I once saw two pre-teenage girls spend forty minutes reciting rap music in a bus. And the amazing thing is that they had done it quite spontaneously: young minds do.

I’m sharing a table with Yeats and Montalvo, because I remembered having heard him recite his own poetry. Wait—it wasn’t so much “recite” but what Seamus Heaney called “an elevated chant.”  Here’s what a wonderfully crusty Yeats has to say about his reading:

“I’m going to read my poems with great emphasis upon their rhythm,” says Yeats in the first segment, recorded in 1932, “and that may seem strange if you are not used to it. I remember the great English poet William Morris coming in a rage out of some lecture hall, where somebody had recited a passage out of his Sigurd the Volsung. ‘It gave me a devil of a lot of trouble,’ said Morris, ‘to get that thing into verse!’ It gave me a devil of a lot of trouble to get into verse the poems that I am going to read, and that is why I will not read them as if they were prose.” 

OK—that was a thing to hear, and then I remembered the story about hearing Brahms play his Hungarian Rhapsody number one. Well, dear Reader, I’m saving you the two minutes you undoubtedly would have given it: the sound quality is awful, to the extent that the piece is virtually unrecognizable. It’s the sound of a piano being played during a hurricane.

I take a break to “edit” the poem that Montalvo has just transcribed, and we have a little talk about line breaks.

“It might be a little stronger if you shifted the word ‘into’ to the next line, and ended with the verb ‘fall,’” I tell him.

“Oh, and what about using a stronger verb than ‘fall?’ Maybe ‘plunge?’”

Right—then it was time to drop back in on voices from the past—in this case Florence Nightingale, who can be heard, and who delivers a short message of support for her “dear comrades” at Balaclava.

“You know, that first stanza? It’s a statement, and that makes me crazy. So could you give me an image, a metaphor, something that summons up a picture?”

He goes back and revises.

“Poetry is imaginary gardens with real toads in them,” I tell him, and then think, ‘damn, who was that?’

Answer—Marianne Moore.

“That’s the difference between poetry and prose,” I tell him.

“Prose?”

Teaching teaches you some things. I hold up my right hand and say “poetry;” then the left hand and “prose.” He gets it.

Voices from the past. I ponder this young man, my new son, in front of me, and wonder what my grandmother would make of him. She would understand, I think, a young man carrying notebooks in which he has written his poems. She would get the impetuous, rebellious spirit. And she might like an older man reading and critiquing a younger writer.

‘There are some things that don’t change,’ I think. ‘The young are busy reinventing the world, and God bless them for it, because if there’s any hope for us, somebody has got to do some major reconstructive surgery. But the old see continuity, the rolling river of tradition. Also valuable….’

“Well, it’s a post that doesn’t have an ending,” I tell him, since I’m floundering here.

“Some don’t,” he tells me.

Who’s teaching whom?

Monday Afternoon Pleasures

Well, it was a day that set off to be easy, since I woke up knowing what I was going to write about—no casting about, looking under stones, poking into the odd corners of the Internet (let’s see, any other metaphors here to mix?)

I was going to tell you, you see, about the weird fact that while Joseph Haydn had written some 400 songs based on Scottish folk songs, nobody had bothered to publish them until something like 2004. OK—my journalist father, grumbling down from his celestial newsroom, forced me to look up the citation:

The reason why the song arrangements have so far remained in the shadow of the other late works and only very few of them have been performed, is largely because only a very small number of them was available in new editions. Only since the year 2005 the song arrangements are available in the complete edition of Haydn’s works, Joseph Haydn Werke, edited by the Joseph Haydn Institut in Cologne and published by G. Henle in Munich.

What! Boys, boys—Haydn died in 1809, after busily having composed over a hundred symphonies, a zillion string quartets, umpteen masses, two MAJOR oratorios, as well as troubling himself to invent the symphony and champion the string quartet. In fact, in the time it takes me to drink a cup of coffee, Haydn had composed something and gone off to compose something else. And then you guys take almost TWO centuries to get about publishing his stuff? There’s a word for this—criminal neglect!

Well, I had come upon these things because, in a self-satisfied moment on Monday (self-satisfied because I was getting through it), I had decided to listen to Jean Redpath, and whatever she cannot do for a Scottish song doesn’t need to be done. And since the news on the island is horrendous and rapidly getting worse (today’s headline in El Vocero is Bomba de Tiempo, and yes, that does mean “Time Bomb”), it was decidedly time to jump islands and centuries. And since I had met the Redpath briefly, and found her funny and self-deprecating—she recounted how she had met a fellow Scot at an intermission, and he had told her he was liking the concert, so far—it was time to wander off to Wikipedia, to get the dope on Jean. And that’s where I found: among all of the recordings, Redpath had recorded the Haydn Scottish Songs.

Hunh?

Wikipedia to YouTube, YouTube to Wikipedia: that’s my life these days. OK—so I clicked on the clip, and was treated to a minute or so of elegant, rococo Haydn. And then? Auld Lang Syne!

The worst thing?

Nobody, absolutely nobody pays the least attention anymore to Marc in his corner, giggling to himself.

Oh well, at least they know I’m harmless….

The cool thing about these arrangements is that they’re for piano, violin and cello—a piano trio—as well as voice, of course. And why was that?

There was a time, Dear Reader, before our degenerate age of Internet and television, when everybody—well, mostbody—could play an instrument. Oh, and read music. And so what did people do, of an evening, to whittle away the hours before bed? They sat down to the piano, and played an air or tune. Think Jane Austen!

So, from the sound of the arrangements, they’re not all that technically challenging, which means that, for a musician, they’d be totally fun to play. And an added benefit? The music comes from the first years of the 19^th century, when Haydn was in his prime.

Right—so that was interesting, as was the news that Beethoven had gotten into the act, and had written—well, back to the same source:

What is probably the most striking aspect of these folk song settings is that Beethoven wrote far more of these than any other type of composition, having composed an astounding 179 folk song arrangements spanning a period of eleven years from 1809 to 1820. 

1809 to 1820? Given the fact that Beethoven died in 1827, this puts these works respectably into the middle and late periods. And Beethoven follows the practice of using a piano trio as accompaniment. The cool thing? The violin and cello are optional—adding to the richness, but not necessary.

So Monday had passed happily, listening to music I had never imagined existed! Every musician’s dream!

Tuesday?

Stay tuned!

And for a seriously beautiful, almost haunting, song, click below:

In Bed with Alex Jones

Confession—I fight it, but not always successfully, so if you need any information on, for example, the alleged Boys Town pedophile scandal, well, I’m your man. Months ago, I spent a cheerful Sunday afternoon—when I didn’t have to be writing—boning up on the subject via YouTube.

Ah YouTube! What a boon to conspiracy nuts and paranoia freaks! In the past, Dear Reader, you had to go to special places—usually drugstores with big magazine sections—to get your fix of extraterrestrials, Mothman, our beloved chupacabra (Puerto Rico’s gift to the world, say I proudly) not to mention that old favorite, the takeover of the entire world by a highly secret, international group of financiers, industrialists and politicians. Now, you can trot over to YouTube and see undercover footage of the Cremation of Care, which does look a little crazy.

You may not know the cremation, since most people, unlike writers, do important things: go to work, raise kids, worry about the bills. But you might have heard about Bohemian Grove, the camp of redwoods north of San Francisco, which for two weeks in July fills up with rich guys peeing in the woods. If you haven’t, here’s a nice little introduction by our old nemesis, Richard M. Nixon:

•           "The Bohemian Grove, that I attend from time to time—the Easterners and the others come there—but it is the most faggy goddamn thing you could ever imagine, that San Francisco crowd that goes in there; it's just terrible! I mean I won't shake hands with anybody from San Francisco."—President Richard M. Nixon on the Watergate tapes, Bohemian Club member starting in 1953.[17][40]

•          "If I were to choose the speech that gave me the most pleasure and satisfaction in my political career, it would be my Lakeside Speech at the Bohemian Grove in July 1967. Because this speech traditionally was off the record it received no publicity at the time. But in many important ways it marked the first milestone on my road to the presidency."—President Richard Nixon, Memoirs (1978)

Ah, Dick! Wonderful how much I don’t miss him!  

Well, the Bohemian Grove is owned by the Bohemian Club, which was set up in the late 19^th century by a group of San Francisco men. And here, by the way, is Wikipedia’s explanation of the origin of the name:

In New York City and other American metropolises in the late 1850s, groups of young, cultured journalists flourished as self-described "bohemians" until the American Civil War broke them up and sent them out as war correspondents.[4] During the war, reporters began to assume the title "bohemian," and newspapermen in general took up the moniker. "Bohemian" became synonymous with "newspaper writer".[4] California journalist Bret Harte first wrote as "The Bohemian" in The Golden Era in 1861, with this persona taking part in many satirical doings. Harte described San Francisco as a sort of Bohemia of the West.[5] Mark Twain called himself and poet Charles Warren Stoddard bohemians in 1867.

OK—coming from a family of journalists, I can tell you that the words “journalists” and “cultured” are rarely coupled, especially if a negative isn’t somewhere nearby. And today, how bohemian is the club?

Not very, given that you have to be rich and connected to get in—oh, and the waiting list spans decades. The real question is what the hell goes on there, since it’s top secret, which makes it excellent fodder for us conspiracy theorists. But here are the top theories:

·      the big boys are gathering to  mastermind the takeover of all governments to implement a “new world order.” And guess who’s running it?

·      The big boys like to drink and piss in the woods

·      The big boys are engaging in satanic rituals

Here’s the problem with conspiracy theories—occasionally they’re right. So whatever is going on north of San Francisco a month from now, we can probably say that the CIA or FBI was seriously messing with Paul Robeson, a guy so talented it’s easier to say what he wasn’t than what he was. Here, Wikipedia takes a stab at it:

Paul Leroy Robeson (/ˈroʊbsən/ rohb-sən April 9, 1898 – January 23, 1976) was an African-American singer and actor who became involved with the Civil Rights Movement. At Rutgers University, he was an outstanding football player, then had an international career in singing, as well as acting in theater and movies. He became politically involved in response to the Spanish Civil War, fascism, and social injustices. His advocacy of anti-imperialism, affiliation with communism, and criticism of the United States government caused him to be blacklisted during the McCarthy era. Ill health forced him into retirement from his career. He remained until his death an advocate of the political stances he took.

Ill health? Certainly something happened to Robeson in Moscow in March of 1961; with apparently no psychiatric history, Robeson became acutely anxious, paranoid, depressed during what Wikipedia describes as “an uncharacteristically wild” party. Eventually, he locked himself in his bedroom and tried to slit his wrists. (The nurse in me needs to tell you—this is anatomically impossible….)

Robeson somehow ended up in London, where for almost two years he was zapped with shock therapy and given heavy does of barbiturates. After his son transferred him to a clinic in East Berlin, he “rapidly improved,” again according to Wikipedia.

But if the son is to be believed, the whole thing was fishy. First, consider how acute and how fast his symptom developed—he had been completely normal hours before. Then, through the Freedom of Information Act, Robeson ‘s son learned that the FBI and CIA had been tracking his father and mother for years. And then, also while in Moscow, Robeson had the same thing happen to him: an acute attack of anxiety, depression, and paranoia.

So what was going on? Here’s more from Wikipedia:

Paul Jr. believed that his father's health problems stemmed from attempts by CIA and MI5 to "neutralize" his father.[238][239] He remembered that his father had had such fears prior to his prostate operation.[240] He said that three doctors treating Robeson in London and New York had been CIA contractors,[238] and that his father's symptoms resulted from being "subjected to mind depatterning under MKULTRA", a secret CIA programme.[241] Martin Duberman claimed that Robeson's health breakdown was probably brought on by a combination of factors including extreme emotional and physical stress, bipolar depression, exhaustion and the beginning of circulatory and heart problems. "[E]ven without an organic predisposition and accumulated pressures of government harassment he might have been susceptible to a breakdown."

Whether the CIA was involved or not, it’s certainly true that the fifties were a terrible decade for Robeson—he was blacklisted since 1948, his passport was revoked for most of the decade, and he got slapped in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1956. Wouldn’t you be paranoid? And it seems that Project MKUltra did exist, though the CIA destroyed a lot of its records in the height of the Watergate scandal. Remember, we were all nutso about the Communists, so the idea of setting up brothels, installing one-way mirrors, and then giving unwitting subjects LSD, interrogating the men later—all done under a program called Operation Midnight Climax—made a certain bizarre sense. If better dead than red was true, then there wasn’t much that you wouldn’t do….

From the son’s account, Robeson never quite got back in the saddle; he was unable to attend the celebration of his 75^th birthday at Carnegie Hall. He had been an activist, a socialist, a supporter of the Soviet Union, and of trade unions. All of that, unfortunately, made him a little too hot a potato for comfort. In his life, he had been able to do so many things: he played pro football, he sang, he acted, he graduated from Columbia Law school, he spoke out for the marginalized. What couldn’t he do?

Take on the CIA.

Who of us can?

Attention, Wal-Mart!

Let me tell you a story, a very familiar story. You are awakened at 3 in the morning by your three-year old, who announces, as best he can, that he has diarrhea. You sigh, get up, go to the bathroom, and yes—there it is. You wash the child, put him to bed, and wait for the inevitable. Sure enough, two days later, again at 3 AM, you’re at your local hospital. You wonder how much, if any, sleep you can get before you drag off to work….

Let me tell you a story, a very familiar story. You are awakened at 3 in the morning by your three-year old, who announces, as best he can, that he has diarrhea. You sigh, get up, go to the bathroom, and yes—there it is. You wash the child, put him to bed, and wait for the inevitable. Sure enough, two days later, again at 3 AM, you’re at your local clinic in a small town in rural Zambia, where there are no medicines. Your gut wrenches: your child may very well die. You trudge home, passing as you go small shops, all of which have Coca-Cola for sale.

There are people who have the word “why” wrapped tightly around every strand of their DNA, and my guess is that Simon and Jane Berry—two retired people who had a little to go off and save humanity—are two such people. And their question, as you can guess, is “why can a town have Coca-Cola but not have medicines? If the Coca-Cola can get there, why can’t a simple, cheap diarrhea kit that could save a kid’s life get there? Why do one in five kids in parts of Africa die of diarrhea before they reach the age of five?”

The nice thing about the why people is that they keep on asking questions, frequently driving everybody else who is just trying through the day, dammit, nuts. So Mr. and Mrs. Berry—they’re British, so no “Simon” or “Jane” here—asked, “why don’t we use the extra space in the crates of Coke to get the diarrhea kits up to the stores that sell the Coca-Cola? 

Presto, mágico! (And I’m sure it wasn’t that easy….)

Tremendous idea, right? The Berrys had designed the kit to fit between the bottles of Coca-Cola. And the kit—which contains basic salts, soap, and a towel—is relatively cheap; as I recall, it costs about a dollar to produce the kit, and it’s a nice little moneymaker for the shopkeeper, with a good margin.

Unbelievably, the Berrys succeeded in getting the attention of Coca-Cola, and they met with them and learned about their distribution chain. That frequently looks like this:

Well, the whole thing seemed like a great idea, when I was pondering the problem of what to write about last July, and also wondering what to do about my brother John and his wife Jeanne, who have:

1.     everything

2.     birthdays in early July

So it seemed like a good idea—why not donate 10 dollars every month? What’s ten bucks to me? So I called John and Jeanne up on vacation and told them about it, and then I forgot that I / they were making the donation. (Just as an aside, isn’t it criminal that we are living in a world where ten dollars is nothing for some, and everything for others?)

Well, among the people for whom the ten dollars is nothing are Bill and Melinda Gates—I’m presuming no introductions needed—who, so says the email the Berrys sent me, agreed to screen a documentary of the project in Seattle last month. Nice!

In fact, I also have a fair amount of “why” bred in the marrow of my bones, and I spent seven years at a company even bigger than Coca-Cola making everybody completely crazy. And when Wal-Mart could bear it no more, they showed me the door; there are, however no hard feelings.

So here are my questions, presented in good business English as a bulleted list:

·     Why doesn’t Wal-Mart partner with ColaLife (the Berrys’ organization)?

·     Why not sell the kit in Wal-Mart (the cost of Pedialyte at Walgreens—sorry, but it’s closer—is six bucks, so what a Volume Producing Item! Wow—better than those Moon Pies!)?

·     Why not donate one dollar for every kit sold to Colalife, thus letting the developed world help the undeveloped world?

There’s something about the Internet that makes people go nuts, and a good example I draw from the comments section of the “About ColaLife” page:

The third world government should tax coca cola and other multi nation corporations at proper rates according to their level of profits. This tax then should be use to supply medicine and infrastructure for the maufacture and distribution of medicines,

These half ass aid program does very little to truly alleviate underdevelopment or promote progress. These programs only continue the dependency and underdevelopment of Africa.

Tax coca cola and other multinational like they do in the west and use the money for medicines and infrastructure.

Ouch—as much for the grammatical errors and typos, as for the content. Fortunately, Mr. Berry is a more temperate soul, and does a neat job of first agreeing with him, and then—gently—demolishing him.

In fact, I think the Berrys’ ideas are a breakthrough on several levels—not the least of which is to combine the private sector with public health.

Now then, Wal-Mart, you guys in?

Ah, Youth!

Well, the question, the sizzling question that bedeviled our days and vexed our nights was…

…would Montalvo be able to piss in a bottle?

He’s back, you see, having wedged his way in through the door of the sister shop first, and then having passed once or twice in the gift shop that adjoins the café—where he has worked and been fired so often that no one can remember how many times it’s been—and then having appeared in disguise on Tuesday night for Poetry Night.

“I was not in disguise,” sputters Montalvo, whose name has been changed to protect the guilty. Montalvo, you see, had formed a mystical, transcendental, liminal attachment to a rare blue bird—of which there are only five thousand or so in the world. Nor was it surprising, that attachment, which was greatly enhanced by a drug that only guys in Colorado can do legally. So he had a tangle—no, call it a collision—with the law, was the object of a lot of men’s attention during his eight-day jail stay, and got off by agreeing to piss in a bottle weekly for a year.

“I was wearing shades and a hoodie, that’s all,” say Montalvo.

“You looked like a hood, and nobody recognized you,” said Lady, “so that’s a disguise, right?”

So he’s back, which is where he should be, since home? Well, it’s sometimes not all domestic bliss.

“She was slapping me, just ‘cause I came home at 3 in the morning after smoking cigars and drinking whisky with some friends! Can you believe it? Slapping me, my own mother! And why do women think they got the right to slap men? If I did that to them, they’d call the cops on me, slap a restraining order on me, throw me in the jug! Sure, it doesn’t hurt, but it hurts here….”

He taps his chest above his heart.

“It’s your mom’s house,” I tell him. “Her house, her rules. You know what? My mother would never have allowed me back in the house, at age twenty-one, unless I were working—and paying rent—or studying. And there would always be rules, one of which would have been not coming home drunk at 3 AM. So why Puerto Rican women let their sons come home, use the place like a hotel, expect food and laundry services—I just don’t get it.”

He’s upset; his girlfriend has broken up with him. Oh, and slapped him around, too.

“You know what? If you got two people slapping you around, you must be doing something that really pisses them off. So maybe it’s time to think about what that is?”

Am I man enough to be a dad?

“Yeah, but it hurts here….”

Again the tap.

“They shouldn’t have done it, but that doesn’t let you off the hook,” I told him. It’s a balancing act, this fatherhood thing, and you gotta cut a little slack sometimes.

So we’ve agreed to get together every Friday and work on our projects: his first book of poetry, and my magnum opus,  A Year at The Poet’s Passage. It’s all the best posts of this illustrious and international blog. Order your copy today!

The problem? Montalvo doesn’t have a computer, just an iPad, and a keyboard that his sister doesn’t seem to be using, so he’s sure that he can take it….

“Do you want a third woman slapping you?”

Did I mention that Montalvo is fatally, and certainly criminally, twenty-one?

So that meant that Montalvo showed up around ten one night, when Mr. Fernández and I were sitting around, errr …. drinking whisky and smoking cigars. So guess who joined us?

It wasn’t enough, you see, to procure the legal services to save—and I mean this quite literally—Montalvo’s ass for eight days (he was the object or subject or maybe both of constant catcalls, those eight days in the slammer), now I had to lend him a computer. Why? Because whatever app he was going to use to process the words that would then turn to poetry probably wouldn’t produce a file format that any publisher could work with. Which was easier? Lend him my spare computer, or go through the headache of file conversion?

So here I am, writing this, and in thirty minutes he’s supposed to show up. Oh, and guess what? It turns out that we’re not going to be working on our projects but, instead, on his project, since what has Lady told him?

“You know, you can send me these poems, and they’re good and all, but they’re full of misspellings. I could correct them, but you know whose really a great editor? Who can really tear a new hole in you? Marc! Man, he’s fierce!”

Damn….

“So what did he say?”

“He said, ‘yeah, my man!’”

“That’s what he always says,” I tell her, and Lady goes off to see what might be going on in the kitchen.

So he’ll be here, or he won’t, and I’ll know, or I won’t, whether he peed in the bottle today because yesterday? It was the beginning of the National Stop (Paro Nacional—which should be General Strike, but I like National Stop better….) And indeed it was a national stop because all of the protesters took over the tunnel that connects everything to everything else, and nobody moved. Well, not the cars, at least, but the protesters had brought guitars and tambourines and various percussion instruments—all to keep up the ánimo, and very important that is—so there was plenty of stationary movement. As well as entertainment….

I think I’ve learned the first lesson of fatherhood….

…youth must be served!