Cigarettes and Fruit

Panama City at some point in the past, received a bunch of American school buses. The standard, vinyl seated, Kraft cheese-yellow school bus. They used them as the city buses, making great alterations to the outside but none to the inside.The buses have pastel murals on their sides and filigree, like ribbons wrapped all around them. Some have tinted window, some have chrome rims and sound systems, but on the inside, they are all still American school buses, some that still have the original rules of student conduct pasted on the front panel. As you can imagine this is very disorientating. These buses that look like something produced for an MTV special, Pimp my Bus, or something like that, pulling up with a roar, the guy who stands at the door to take your money waving you in and once inside your transported back to 6th grade, and it's really tempting to start kicking the bottom of the seat in front of you. I'd like to make that a clearer analogy for what Panama City is, how it is an upside-down America, exaggerated but also understated, but I'm too tired from walking around all day. I started my morning at the bus station. I backed out of going on a trip somewhere else and decided to stay in Panama City since I had gotten in the night before and still hadn't seen any of it. I wandered around the bus station for a few minutes, disorientated and unsure where I should be going, until finally just getting on the closest pimp bus. After I got on I asked the driver ´´¿usted va al centro?´´ which is horrible Spanish for ´´are you going downtown?´´. He seemed to understand however and nodded. I didn't know if I was expected to pay first, as in most other places, or later. I quickly decided I'd rather make an idiot out of myself walking off without paying rather than trying to force the driver to take my money early, especially when I didn't even know how much to give him. I went toward the back, following my old jr. high instinct, just in case I wanted to make those fart sounds that one makes by holding your palms over the mouth and blowing. I sat behind an obviously upset German couple with huge backpacks. They were sitting in different seats, probably because of the bags, but they also looked like they wanted to be sitting in different seats. They were whispering to each other in strained German. I invite you to imagine how that sounds on a bus that blasting Cumbia at 6 in the morning. It was certainly odd, but since I hadn't yet had any coffee nothing was making much since to me anyway. It was actually the coffee deprivation that caused me to get off the bus where I did. At some point I decided that it looked like we were close enough to downtown and, upon seeing a coffee stand I jumped off in a neighborhood that could only be described as a slum. Since the coffee works on my bravado as well as my wakefulness I wasn't too worried even though I was very obviously a tourist with my bag on and my dopey way of looking at birds that I've never seen before and making impressed noises under my breath like 'whooow!'. Everyone must have just thought that there was something wrong with me because I was left to coo over birds in peace, walking down the littered and broken streets with a styrofoam cup of coffee in my hand. At the edge of the downtown area I stopped into a grocery store that just happened to be opening as I passed. I stepped through those doors and I stepped into America. Either you have once been away from the states long enough to be amazed by the presence of some products or you haven't. It is not something I have the wherewithal to describe to you. It's a good thing I had had my coffee or else I very well could've ended up wandering around that place in a daze all day trying to decide what I was going to buy. When I stepped back outside, I left American soil, made sovereign by Stovetop mixes and Mrs. Butterworth's syrups. As far as I'm concerned where ever those two things are seen together is America, if only a small part of it. Back outside there was a soccer game going on in a park about two blocks away. Walking by, I felt a tinge of sloth watching the young kids run around like crazy, chasing the ball no matter where it went,one kid not even wearing shoes on the gravel portion of the field, but still running at such a clip to be literally slapping his feet on the ground. You could hear the gravel being packed down. Just on the other side of a main road from the park there was a massive, waterfront hotel. At my request, I was given a map, which I would go on to consult and shove back in my pocket so many times throughout the day that it would loose all form and eventually come to look like a colorful wad of toilet paper hanging out of my back pocket. Consulting the map, I found my way to the fabled Parque Nacional. The only rain forest preserve to be found within city limits. As excited as I was to get to the rain forest, passing an elaborate church I decided to stop in and admire whatever frescoes they may have had painted. A habit I have developed in my travels as churches are often cool and relaxing when the city is cacophonous and pushy. I had forgotten that it was Sunday and soon found myself standing at the back of a service, head bowed, trying to mouth the words to the Lord's Prayer in Spanish to not lose face. I found it interesting that going to church as a kid I still remembered almost everything that a service is comprised of and therefore I was able to pick a little of religious terminology in Spanish,knowing that so much of a service is a sort of call and response...´´Lord, hear our prayer.´´ Just before communion began, I ducked out. Though the church had been cool it also had that particular odor that only churches have: cheap coffee, some kind of semi-plush carpet (or marble) wood finish, dust and polyester. By comparison, the world outside, the city with rainforest crowding all around it smelled magnolia, clove, mango and tree sap. The alternating currents of these harmonious smells drug me bodily through the city. They would rise and swell, like notes in a symphony. As I would near a coconut palm the humidity would take on a milky quality. When I would near a mango tree it would grow Kool-Aid sweet. A mango tree. Ripe mangos scattered around it, rotting and rolling around on the sidewalk. Throughout the day I was picking them up, brushing them off and feeling like I had broken in to Eden while eating them. I couldn't initially find my way to the Parque Nacional despite it being obviously before me on the map. I continually found myself running across eight-lane highways, and stopping to ask tollbooth operators where the hell the footpath was for the park, if it even had one. After walking up an exit ramp I talked to yet another tollbooth operator who told me that, if I did somehow find my way into the jungle on foot (he had never heard of there being any kind of trail) that I'd have to be damn careful to not be bitten by a poisonous snake, since, he said, the jungle was practically teeming with them. When I found my way into the park about 20 minutes later I still had this warning in mind, and since I had never been to a jungle before I made my way along the path with a stick out in front of me, held out like some kin of primitive mine detector. When 5 minutes of walking had passed, and I hadn't scared up any snakes, I dropped the whole business and plodded along clumsily enough to seduce any snake within ten miles into biting me. I had this intention of taking a nap in the rain forest, but when the somnolence of the light rain and the resulting humidity began to sway me, the ferocious ants and the clouds of possibly malarial mosquitoes made it almost impossible to lay down, let alone sleep. As I was leaving the forest, I walked by a culvert that I hadn't noticed on the way in, beside it were 100s of those lizards that stand up and run on their hind legs. It was like some kind of absurd salute, as I walked by, every few feet, another one of them would jump up and splash across the water in that absurd, exaggerated way. I tried to take a video but I was far too enamored with the lizards to train a camera on them and every time I tried I ended up with a video of the tops of the trees with the voice over of me saying 'waooow' quietly to myself. I decided to go eat after the jungle and I made it my mission to find one of the Taco Bells in the city, since it's been days now since I've had any hot food. It wasn't a far walk from the jungle to the shopping district, which is basically a hive of Death Star-sized shopping malls, situated along a grey piece of Pacific coast, polluted, probably, by their construction. These shopping malls are called: Multicentro, Multiplaza and Metromall. As you can imagine they are virtually indistinguishable from each other. For this reason, I wandered around under their pall for hours, frequently bushwhacking my way through landscaped medians other ornamental areas to get from one place to the other in an area where everyone drives and sidewalks would be pointless. I had to eat my Taco Bell outside because there were no open tables at the food court. There was also some kind of children's theater adjacent to the seating area that was continually beeping and crashing, that would have made eating in there much like eating in a pinball machine. So, I ate in the parking lot, consoling myself by thinking of all the mango trees that surely could not be too far away. I tried to walk to Panama´ viejo, but when I found myself walking down another highway, I decided to take a bus, an all-black tinted school bus, reggaeton rattling the windows and the seats in much better condition than I remember them ever being on our school buses although they were upholstered in the same molten-looking forest green vinyl that never really loses it's smell. Panama´ viejo is a place that you'd be better off going to with someone else. Some places just require you to share the experience of them. I don't know, like there's a feeling of vacancy in the air otherwise. Somehow, Panama´Viejo and it's ruined towers and ramparts made me feel like that and although it's a UNESCO World Heritage site, I found the bus rides there and back much more interesting than the place itself. If you think about a school bus, I mean the way the seats are positioned and the aisles, you can see how it would be a really bad method of mass transit once the seats were all taken. When I got on the bus outside of Panama´ Viejo I found such a crowded bus waiting for me. The meager aisle that those things have was roiling with undulating people trying to get on, off or into a seat that was opening. Imagine, someone getting up and moving into the aisle from a seat, while the person standing next to him in the aisle moves aside while those in the back push to get through to be let off while and old lady pushes back to get to the seat that's just opened. Remember: the aisles of school buses are not much wider the 16 inches or so. At some point I took a seat when I began to feel like myself and all the other passengers were just teeth in someone crack head's mouth, continually grinding and gnashing away. I immediately regretted sitting down, however, when I realized that my face was now a crotch level from all the guys that were chomping and grating as I had previously been. But, so long as no one was intentionally forcing his crotch into my face I really didn't have cause to complain. And for a quarter to get across town I guess it's just that I should have to deal with some kind of, uh, inconvenience. I got off by mall land and just kept walking, it was getting dark and I really didn't have any idea where I was going, but I just kept walking, like I was on auto pilot after an entire day of walking all over the city. I was walking down Via Argentina when a black SUV pulls out in front of me. The guys rolls down his window saying 'una pregunta.' I shake my head emphatically and keep walking since I'm sure he wants directions somewhere, and though I'd try to help him once he heard my accent and saw my toilet paper map he'd already have his foot off the break. But he waves me over anyway. ´Hey! I've seen you three different times today,' he says, sounding almost annoyed, like he was getting tired of looking at me, like I was some kind of annoying new billboard that kept assaulting his field of vision. I don't really know how to respond to this so I just say something like 'yeah?´. 'Yeah,' he says, damn all over the place, this morning walking by the grocery store, this afternoon over by the malls and nowyou're over here.' While he saying all this it's impossible to gauge how he feels about this, let alone why he's bothered to tell me. He keeps shaking his head in a manner that looks more than nonplussed. When he's done telling me about how many times he's seen me, he pauses as if waiting for a response, like I'm to explain my behavior to him. 'Well, I like to walk,' I try. 'Hmmm,'he replies. Not knowing what else to say I joke, 'well, I guess I'll probably see you tomorrow,' and I smile. There's no response from him. I say good bye and then he drives away. I still don't know if he was somehow upbraiding me for walking too much, or making myself obvious enough to me noticed, but whatever he meant, it seemed like a satisfactory end to a Sunday of walking alone all day. At least someone noticed. Although, just why or how he noticed, I'll never know.

The Sound Becomes the Setting

The sound of the alarm startles me out of something. It could’ve been something other than a dream, because when I woke up I was completely unable to recall any of it, and I suppose it’s possible that we are capable of doing other things in our deep sleep other than dreaming. I couldn’t find the phone that the alarm was coming from. I dug in my pants’ pockets coming only across other items that in my state registered only as complete abstractions, Keys: hard and somewhat sharp; Wallet: misshapen leather brick; papers and money: whispery intangibles blurred around the edges like the state I had just awoken from. By the time I finally found the phone, improbably in a pant leg, I was awake enough to get up and start the coffee.
At the early hour, in recognition of the holiday weekend, the streets were nearly empty. The sun had already been up for at least an hour or so, but it had yet to completely clear the tallest buildings downtown so the resulting light was largely mottled in appearance, bright and dim at once and not yet complete; it still looked very much like early morning despite the fact that it was nearly eight o’clock. On the sidewalks there were newspaper vendors still readying their wares for sale; tying and untying the great bulwarks of paper that had been left for them on the sidewalk. There were teenagers still out from the night before, having a last coffee at the McDonalds before going home to sleep the day away and to dream about the advances they had made in their status as teenagers. At an intersection, I stopped at a red light, a little past the crosswalk and a cab driver on the perpendicular path yelled and made an unintelligible gesture as he drove slowly through the intersection. A few blocks later the skyscrapers of microcentro rose up around us and the cooler wind, longer steeped in the dark interstices between the buildings brought up the hackles around our necks and down our backs. It was a light, autumnal cold that otherwise just touched our knuckles and ears.
The Microcentro area terminates on a slope that jettisons bicycles and cars and anything else that carries enough momentum across a wide avenue before Buenos Aires’ river port with the somewhat ironic name of Puerto Madero. We ferried ourselves safely across one of the many bridges that span it and stopped at the edge of the nature reserve, where despite tidy landscaping and frequent trash cleanup, the place has an almost third-world kind of appearance owing to the presence of scores of sloppy parilla shacks painted in pastels that have been coated with a patina of wood smoke, meat fat and dribblings of all the mayonnaise-like sauces of Argentina. One such parilla shack with a coarse painting of the Falkland islands on it was already laying out its plastic tables, cooking its onioned meat and piping its tinny pop music out as if it could somehow conjure up a Saturday evening on a Friday morning by just creating the ambiance.
We were told that the park was closed, but rather than risk it we decided to wait around near the gate with the coffee we had brought. A large and dirty black cat sidled out of the park and over to us with the mien of still having a thrashing bird in his mouth. He sought our sympathies in vain as he was too bold for me and too dirty for Gina and took his leave when he saw a park worker arrive that he had no doubt earlier seduced into his aloof affections. When we heard a similar rustling from the other side of where we were having our coffee we were both surprised to find a kind of amalgamate bird standing there, a species that I had been telling Gina about since before she had arrived. About the size of a small pheasant, this bird has a russet-colored breast, dark wings (that it doesn’t seem to use) a bright green beak and bright tea-colored eyes. I would guess it to be some kind of waterfowl since the reserve is mostly marshland on the Rio de la Plata.
Twenty minutes after we had been told that the park was closed the gates were opened and we, along with everyone else who had had the tenacity to wait, entered. In the morning when the park is still it feels more wild that in the afternoon when it is full of joggers who seem to take some kind of perverse pleasure in running around the last vestige of un-urbanized Buenos Aires with headphones, dark glasses and spandex, ignoring all the details of the park or perhaps just preferring the encounter them quickly and move on. We rode slowly though the park, one moment finding ourselves washed in sunlight and the next plunged back under a cold umbra of leaves. The rocks of the trail crinkled under our tires and the birds called out to each other above our heads, our worlds so close as to be overlapping but entirely unknown to each other. As usual, I tried to greet the joggers and other bikers in the park as one does in the United States, even in large cities, in the morning, both parties acknowledging the similarities in their characters that have taken them out of bed so early in the morning. I received no reply. The people here don’t seem over eager to conspire about the merits on getting up early with strangers.
On the way out we stopped at a building site to watch a group of puppies finish their breakfast of garbage and to duck back under the fence where their mother has safely herded them. We watched until the last one frolicked out of sight, reminded of the large numbers of animals that we had once enjoyed watching back in Arcata, California in much more suitable surroundings.
With the last couple swallows of coffee in the thermos we sat down in another park to linger for a few more minutes. A man with three greyhounds approached us and pointed to a bird mira al pajarito alla…. He went on to explain with no further introduction how the bird we were now all looking at together mimicked the sounds of all other birds and as soon as he had finished speaking the bird, seeming to sense its introduction had drawn to a close piped out a perfect medley of about 13 different bird calls, one after another. We watched and listened entranced, so much more so because it seemed as if the bird had down so on command after the man’s description. When the arrhythmic, but strangely beautiful song had ended the man repeated his claim again and walked away. We he had gotten about thirty feet away he stopped and asked ustedes son extanjeros, no? I replied that we were from the states and he paused a moment before adding tenemos muchos pajeros en Argentina and walking away.

apres moi la deluge, de nouveau

Stag beetles are everywhere. I’ve never seen so many in my life. I mean, in my entire life I probably haven’t seen 1/8 the amount of stag beetles I’ve seen in the past two weeks. I’ve seen a few live ones but most of them are dead. I see their black husks in the park where I eat lunch on the weekdays, I see them Retiro on the weekends when I’m going to read and relax and I see them everywhere between, in every park, in every green median, in every rain sodden tree planter the carapaces of beetles, like desert scarabs carved from obsidian glistening with the poisonous fog of fertilizer and Fiat exhaust. These beetles are the life beneath Buenos Aires and they have ascended to die.
My coworkers tell me that the beetles come up before the stormy season, that they are indicative of approaching rain. Since they have appeared it has been raining interminably. During the day the weather has been warm, sometimes a little humid, but usually clear. When the sun sets over the western portion of the city, down in the great beds of the major avenues coloring the sidewalk tiles gold and the iron balconies cadmium, the sky grows dyspeptic; it can be heard rumbling in the failing light, as if the sun itself weren’t just setting but actually crashing down into something, gradually but powerfully, its great mass scudding into the Andes.
The storms have been diluvian, they trail on the edges of the murky light and the sound of far off mountains crashing apart against the surface of the sun. The lightning wisps up from the river, from the great domed ceilings of the train stations and from the lifted white marble hands of the park statues. The static crash of it breaking into the roiling sky follows quickly after the riveting light itself. The lightning bolt is the split between two frames in a continuous picture, the thunder is the sound of the projector crashing to the floor. The rains bring the darkness and blur the edges of the scene being restored. All across the city the stag beetles are scrambling through the loam and detritus to rip through the roots of the planted grasses. There is a sound like sod being pulled up from the ground. The streets flood and turbid water chokes the storms drains and blows back into itself; a great churning as the water seeks out its level. Apartment building doors are open and the hallways rush with water. The leaves are pulled prematurely from the trees, newspapers and cardboard boxes are macerated and the basement at the theater where I work floods.
It was actually already flooded by this time. A day earlier the pump assigned the task of riding the basement of fetid water broke down and there was a rush from the pipes as they sluiced this brackish mess out across the tile floor. I was down in the basement when this began to happen and, unaware that there was a rotten flood rising at my feet, thought that some putrescence had surged through the pipes below, like a slaughterhouse and a chemical factory had dumped some equally noxious stuff down into the pipes at the same time and the result was bubbling under my feet. I heard a trickle, and I realized that while the character of the smell may not have been as bad as previously imagined, it was certainly much more impending. As I looked up from my book, I found that the black and white floor tiles in the places around the drains on the floor were magnified and the light on them was refracted. The drains had begun to flood. Being prudent, I picked up my book and made my way out of the room, closing the door behind me. In the next room, I found again respite for reading and finishing my lunch, which I admit, I no longer had much appetite for. Hardly a few minutes passed before I began to notice the sensation which is not quite a taste nor a smell but nonetheless originates from the sinuses somehow. It is something like the sound of a smell, like the first jarring note in a symphony of stink. The sensation grew into a fragrance, then an odor. It began to thicken the air and swelter in my nose. It was like crack smoke, raw and insubstantial, but heavier than air. The smoke streaked and eddied, it rose and ran and lie flat under my palate and behind my tongue and began to coagulate. It was like a DNA stand, made of only a few simple elements but twisted together in an endless chain of combinations. I heard the trickling again and began to think that it smelled so bad that the smell had developed a sound, but it was only the plasmic water tentacling out from under the door I had so recently closed on it. I put down my lunch and went upstairs to tell someone.
That was two weeks ago. I went into work today to find that the water remains to where it eventually groaned, broke and flatulated to the bottom of the stairs where it seethes about eight inches deep. What was once a ghastly odor has become a rotten ulcer of decomposition, a rancid gastrointestinal scream. I have watched the water at the bottom of those stairs swell and stagnate until it impregnated itself with its own horror and gave birth to a sobbing miasma. The color has deepened from teak, to burgundy to banshee black. The water is a darkness so complete it could extinguish stars. I dare not think around that water for I know it would steal my dreams and drown them, as it does the rats that are unfortunate enough to be found in it, only briefly. I think about its oily, pestilent darkness when I see the rains coming on again. It is the darkness of those dead and dying stag beetles, the seeds of the rain, planted in flooded basements to rise grimly to the surface only to die.

Radio, Radio, Radio

www.radioelsewhere.blogomatic.com

¿Que mas, niño?

Everything has a certain imperceptible nature. There are such nuances in daily life that cannot be properly recorded. While, at times, my life feels somewhat quotidian here, I only have to look back over its individual episodes to see that it remains endowed with the same unflagging tempo as always.
La Boca is not the kind of neighborhood for casual strolls—it can be downright rough in some spots. –Lonely Planet, Argentina guide.
On the phone Sebastian is telling me about a party of some kind in La Boca. I’m only half-listening to him because I’ve got that sticky sunburned feeling all over my body and I woke up at six o’clock in the morning to try to get in as much relaxation as I could since my Saturdays have recently, after returning to forty-hour work weeks for the first time in years, become important to me again. I press my hand to face and feel the warmth there. There is a sticky sound when I pull it away. I feel like a child covered in hot syrup after eating my pancakes too fast. Even my eyes have a dry sticky feeling to them.
“Jona?” Sebastian must’ve asked me a question I missed. He calls me ‘Jona’ has since we met. I have no idea why. Perhaps my nasally Midwestern dialect produces an /a/ sound in place of /i/ and I’m unaware of it. Maybe everyone hears ‘Jona’ but they all just call me Jonny anyway.
“Yeah,” I respond, “I’m still here.” Sebastian has just gotten back from Ecuador where he’s from. We’re both foreigners in Argentina, but in totally different ways. I’ve always liked hanging out with foreigners from non-G-8 countries when I’m abroad. They give you a different perspective on wherever you happen to be. Who cares about the local’s perspective, you can observe that. It’s interesting to talk to Iranians in Armenia, Mexicans in Morocco or, in the present case, Ecuadorians in Argentina. They may be able to explain certain elements of culture that you don’t notice. You discuss how your home countries are dissimilar with wherever you are in different ways.
“So there’s a party tonight later in La Boca. We can go there later.” I have to admit this invitation sounds interesting. I have only been to La Boca a handful of times walking down from San Telmo on Sunday afternoons. I have never been there at night or gone into any of the colorful homes of that neighborhood, which everyone is constantly warning you not to take too many liberties exploring. Still, I don’t anticipate that I’m actually going to get anywhere near this party. While biking has increased my mobility, it hasn’t made me anymore awake around three AM, when parties or other youthful social events tend to begin around here. If anything, biking around makes me more tired by midnight and I’m usually in bed by one, no matter what I set out to do. It’s a fun idea and since I haven’t seen Sebastian in a while it’d be nice to go out and do something instead of the usual beers and Youtube music in his apartment, although I’ve got to say that we’ve had some pretty great times listening to obscure French pop and making up our own dances to it.
“Alright,” I tell him. “We’ll see what happens when I get over there.”
“Yeah, yeah,” he says, knowing what that means, but for once he turned out to be wrong.
I couldn’t have stayed at the party a minute longer without blatantly falling asleep on my girlfriend’s shoulder, which probably would have caused her to topple over since by then she was asleep, too. Fighting to keep my eyes open, and noticing that her’s were already closed I decided it was time to go, regardless of the fact that I had no idea where I was, or how we were going to get home. It was around three AM, so naturally the party was just beginning.
We may have been able to enjoy a little more of the party, in fact maybe we could have enjoyed a lot more of it, but, for one thing, I’ve gotten very entrenched in the habit of getting up early lately and two: well, I’d gotten up even earlier than usual that day to go to the nature preserve for a bike ride before the place go too crowded. It’s hard to get up and get there so early on a Saturday, but it’s worth it. I had a thermos full of coffee made by seven and we left about half an hour later for a tranquil ride under the overhanging trees, acacia plants that bloom in large white flowers and the flocks of screaming parrots.
We came back from the nature preserve (I have to call it that to distinguish it from all the other, much more urban ‘parks’ around here, that are often just fugitive plants and trees hiding behind some large building or other) in order to eat breakfast, which on Saturday consists of potatoes, peppers, tofu and bread, mainly, all other days of the week it consists solely of coffee. After breakfast we rode up to one of the aforementioned ‘parks’ a rather nice one that has the most realistic grass I’ve ever lain in, although at times the ants arise out of it in great plagues and bite at your extremities for sheer malice. It was in this park that I got the bold idea that I could lie there and read in the bright sun for well over an hour with no resulting complications. Such was my boldness that even as we rode away toward Chinatown for our weekly purchase of tofu and jalapenos, which can only be bought there, I felt nothing more than the after-effects of a nice afternoon in the park. In Chinatown, I noticed that Gina’s face was slightly reddened around her nose and cheeks and concluded that mine probably bore similar if not worse evidence of ill-protection.
After we got back from Chinatown we were too hot and sticky and sunburned to make dinner. Usually, dinner is all we talk about after 6 or 7 o’clock, but this particular day it didn’t even occur to us until we were about to leave for Sebastian’s house, whereupon we ate whatever was in the fridge, which, at the time, was black beans and raw carrots.
On the way to Sebastian’s, slightly addled by the fresh darkness and the lack of sufficient digestive material in my stomach, I got confused on subsequently annoyed by the location of his house, a place we had been to many times before. I calmed down after we got inside, had a beer, listened to a few bad songs that I sang along to with due aplomb and after I smoked about twenty cigarettes. Fueled by ungainly amounts of nicotine, vitamin D and general disregard for my own condition we left for La Boca around one AM. I stopped on the way for more cigarettes, which luckily were awful so I wasn’t as tempted to keep stoking the fires to my own eventual demise. In defense of my, at times, excessive smoking here in Buenos Aires, I blame the lack of readily available good coffee. If there are other Latin American countries that have such bad coffee, I suggest that they warn anyone planning on moving there, perhaps before issuing visas, especially if they are highly regarded for so called ‘café culture’ who cares about ‘café culture’ if the espresso tastes like burned carpet?
So now we’re leaving the party. Due to the ill-conceived design of most residential buildings here one would have a hard time slipping out of a party unnoticed, or escaping a burning building; not only do Buenos Aires building require a key for entrance, but also for exit. As the door to our apartment locks automatically, we have often mused about the horrible purgatory that would await anyone who got locked out of the apartment, as they would find themselves, at the same time, locked in the building with nothing to do but wonder around a moan like some pitiful wraith.
We have to track down the girl whose birthday it is to be let out. By Argentine standards we are leaving impolitely early, or at least that’s the impression I got by everyone’s face, or perhaps they had just seen me sleeping and though that I was trying to make some kind of comment about the inability of parties in Argentina to compete with those of my native US; of course I would know nothing about this, never going to parties in the US anymore. It seems to be a stupidity that I save for different countries.
The birthday girl especially has a hurt look on her face, which is hard to take because she’s got one of those faces that’s good at showing subtle disappointment. She is not overtly condemning me, but rather just radiating her eyes in my direction, eyes that belong in Gabriel Garcia Marquez, eyes that have never seen the ocean but are tied to a mind adept at imagining entire worlds underwater. Even though she didn’t know me she let me out of her house as though I were the only guest at the party that mattered.
Of course, we weren’t let out the door without due warning as to just what we undertaking as foreigners attempting to walk around La Boca at night. Many offers were made to call cabs but my pride an empty wallet turned them all down and within a few minutes we were out in the suddenly very dark and echo ridden streets of La Boca trying to get our bearings.
At first we walked quickly, not daring to speak our course native tongue aloud. A few people stumbled around, muttering to themselves and others, in groups cruised down familiar sidewalks. I recalled once riding my bike to the 103rd street in Chicago and after seeing block after block of nothing but young men standing around how relieved I was to finally see a woman, and how terrified I had been when she yelled after me ‘where the crack at?’ But I remember all the subsequent times I had been in supposed ‘bad’ neighborhoods since then, Detroit on Rosa Parks, West Philadelphia, the hill district in Pittsburg and how no one ever bothered me in any of these places. The law of this sort of thing seems to be ‘if you want to avoid being mugged, go where everyone tells you that it’s inevitable that you’ll get mugged there. Of course, I couldn’t help but to think how much my sunburned face stood out, but luckily I didn’t have a backpack with me and I think my haggard look would have made any potential robber think twice about potentially wasting their time on me, which they would have done, given that I had nine pesos on me, the equivalent of about 2.25$.
Eventually, Gina had enough sense to suggest taking a bus, knowing that I would’ve just kept walking by all the stops until we got home, since, for whatever reasons, taking buses annoys me. After what seemed like hours we got back home. The next day I did not get up very early, which was fine because I was still sunburned and it was pretty hot out again.

Americas

I’m writing this with no shirt on. It’s not that it’s unbearably hot. I guess it’s probably in the low 90s during the day. Now it’s dark so it’s probably only about 85, but I’ve got the oven on and I’ve had the oven on for a while. I need the oven to be on when I’m printing shirts that have different colors of ink. There’s probably an easier process but mine involves the oven, which is making the sweat run down my body in saline rivulets. Given the week I’ve had I know only too well the febrile result of these sweat trails on both my clothes and my general disposition. For this reason, I’ve taken off my shirt, a luxury which I’m afforded by being in my home.
Since last Monday, I’ve been living in an exoskeleton. Sometimes it’s dry and chrysalis like, sometimes it’s damp and amphibian, but it’s persistent. The main reason for this being the long bike ride I have to work. Of course it would be expected that a long bike ride in Buenos Aires summer would result in a sweaty countenance, but the bike ride is only the beginning of my saturated days.
About three months ago, I started work with a theater troupe. It was sheer happenstance that led me to this job, but I’m quite happy with it for the time being, as I can’t remember the last time I had a job to which I really enjoyed going. The memorization can be a bit monotonous and nerve-racking, but after seven years or so studying at various universities, I’m fairly accustomed to the rigor of memorizing things and meeting deadlines. The major benefit to the job is that it will eventually result in a great deal of travel, which I suppose, makes me more content than just about anything else.
The group is known as The Performers. Essentially, the duties of an actor for The Performers are as follows: Learn three plays intended for the edification of English language learning students across South and Central America and Mexico. The plays are written with beginner, intermediate and advanced students in mind. The beginner play is a fairly straight-forward kid’s story, with easy-to-comprehend language, repetition and lots of singing and dancing, think: Barney or Teletubbies. The intermediate level play is a little more complex with more dialogue and a large amount of physical comedy. The advanced level play, in the past, has been an adaptation of any Shakespeare play (in the last few years Romeo and Juliet and The Tempest). This year it’s rumored that the more dramatic plays haven’t gone over as well and the effort to lighten the content has resulted in some sort of medley, although we have yet to see the script.
The beginner level play is called Sea Adventure and the intermediate is called Crazy Jekyll and Hyde, the ‘crazy’ is so you know that it’s an adaptation, I guess. I play Harry the Shark and Thomas, a Bi-Polar lab technician, respectively.
The Sea Adventure and Jekyll have been thoroughly rehearsed and choreographed, but they are both still about three weeks from completion. At the present moment, the workload is heavy. Every morning we go in for choreographing at nine and continue with rehearsals after lunch. As I mentioned before it’s been averaging about 90 a day. The air conditioning in the theater is really weak and often feels as if it’s not on at all. The result of this and continually repeated dance steps is complete saturation, partial drying and re-saturation to the point where one’s clothes become stiff with salt.
If it wasn’t for this job, I very much doubt that I would still be in Buenos Aires. If I was still here I would be searching daily for work elsewhere. The city is too familiar.
Antiquity sets Europe apart from the US while the culture has a number of similarities; I have always found it interesting that people tend to think of Europe as being so culturally different from the US, when, in fact, most of our traditions are derived, at least in part, from European counterparts, the only major difference being that in the US they are all blended together. German tradition mixes with Irish, Italian with Polish, Scandinavian with Spanish, added to this mix are African, Asian and Latin American traditions, but none of these are so very unique in themselves, they all have origins elsewhere. Of course Americans created some traditions of their own, but not so many that should render Europe unrecognizable to them. Still, the long history of Europe is plain even in the newer cities, such as Lisbon.
Africa and Asia are so culturally dissimilar to the US that they bristling with a sense of strangeness to the American visitor. The pious Ramadans and orthodox feast days, the overbearing sense of respect for the guest, the ubiquitous cigarette smoke, the crumbling streets, the loquaciousness of complete strangers, the traditional roles of men and women, livestock in the streets, the crowding, the lassitude all these things are so foreign to the American that they take forever to comprehend and are never entirely adjusted to.
Buenos Aires, by comparison, could be on the eastern seaboard of the US. The people would have to speak English, go to bed a little earlier and not spend quite as much time idling, and the bureaucracy and liberalism would have to be cut down a little, but in a country about the same age as America, made up mostly of European immigrants, teeming with McDonalds and Starbucks, there is very little else that sets it apart. Which is not to say that it’s not unique, but I think it’s safe to say that if one doesn’t like large US cities, one probably won’t like Buenos Aires, while it’s entirely possible that one would like, or at least find something very interesting in Rome or Damascus due to their differences from New York or Los Angeles.
So, this job has saved my adventure. I really don’t know where I would’ve contemplated going next, but I almost certainly would’ve had to leave this place, mostly due to the fact that city life doesn’t interest me so much. Unless you were born into it, I think big city life is mostly for people who still feel they are looking for something, an important part of their life they still have yet to discover. I feel like I am content with my station in life as I have never been before, and the result is that I would very much like to retire to a quiet place and spend my evenings and weekends working in a garden, reading and drinking coffee with my girlfriend. But with a job that pays me to travel and act, I feel like I can put off the domesticated life for another year or two; for the time being just knowing that I have reached a point where I would just contemplate getting a full-time job and buying a house is certainly enough. No need to rush into anything.
So, due to the job, I have been losing about a gallon of water a day, most of which is absorbed directly into my clothes. Luckily, we only have one more week of choreographing and then the workload should lesson a little. I will appreciate not having to take the unprecedented number of two showers a day any longer.

A field, a fence

At the end of the day there is a group of kids skating at Faculdad de Medicina, a cross of a piazza and a park, most concrete with a few spare patches of grass. We sit in one of these patches of grass and watch the sun fall beneath the skyline on Cordoba avenue. Minervas and other Greek deities catch the light from their corniced positions and keep it for a while in the folds of their marble gowns, bringing their dimensions out further over the street, their bodies more nubile, their shadows longer and less ungainly. A silk flag flourishes above, like a distant thunder, it can scarcely be heard over the traffic. The skateboards snap and roll. Someone yells to their dog.
We stay on as the twilight deepens, listening and telling stories of our pasts that seem to come, unbidden, from the sounds of the evening. Gina has a difficult time getting anything in because I will not stop talking. The subject now is my last night in Armenia. I recount the details precisely, trying to shape a picture out of a number of random, unconnected details: This bar, this street, this office, this sound we used to hear all the time, the name of a local chain grocery store, the cheap Chinese-made shoes I was wearing. She listens with due patience, knowing that once I’ve begun such a description I won’t stop until it’s finished, no matter how mundane it might be. I continue telling about the July night, waving my hands around, using certain Armenian words like flourishes to complete a thought and then having to double back to explain what they mean. Sometimes, the explanations for the words cost me too much time, I lose the thread of the story after explaining the subtle difference between the Russian “Fcio” and the Armenian “vertch” or “prtsav.” When I say these words, I hear the people saying them from whom I learned them. I see the way they look and smell their cigarettes or perfume. This is why I can’t disregard these details. I’m telling the story to myself as well, just to reaffirm that it did once happen.
My last night in Armenia was in late July, as I tell the story its January in the southern hemisphere, in Argentina it’s about 34 degrees Celsius, probably nearly the same as it would’ve been in Yerevan that night. Perhaps this is why the story has come to mind. It occurs to me as I tell the story, that, as much as I’ve told Gina about Armenia, I don’t know if I’ve ever come to the end of the story before. As I build up the structure of the story, supply the characters and tell about their idiosyncrasies, I realize I’m telling Gina something she’s heard hundreds of times before. She needs no introduction to Yerevan or to Elliot. I don’t need to explain to her what a marshutka is, but I do anyway, just so I can hear the clink of the coins hitting the little carpet where people tossed them to pay on the front consul, so I can hear the Armenchik music and the sound of the shepherds yelling at their sheep outside the windows to get out of the way, just so I can feel the warmth of the other two passengers I’m sitting between. She’s heard all of this many times before, but I don’t know if I ever got to the end. I’m wondering now what the significance of the present telling is. Am I telling her the end, just because the warm evening has reminded me of it? Or the sound of something in the light wind? Or am I telling her because, I’m deciding to bring the epic to a close for a while? I don’t think about it much further. I just continue telling the story because it comes naturally to me, especially on this warm evening.
When I get to Tbilisi, which is, effectively, the end, I stop. For a while neither of us says anything. Although a great deal of interesting things happened to me after I arrived in Tbilisi I don’t try to make any more pronouncements. I don’t hint at them. They are stories that I’ve told before and they are things that are finished, with lingering memories, yes, but still, finished. And I look up at the last bit of light coming over the buildings much further down the avenue. I see Buenos Aires as I imagined it when walking by the escuela Argentina on Baraghmyan street in Yerevan. I see all the dreams I had about this place long before I ever came here and how much of my time spent in the Armenia of my recollections was spent thinking about what it would be like here. I see the circumstances that brought me here and for a moment it seems that I am living a fulfilled wish, only to be sitting where I am at the moment. I see how much I have yet to learn to get to a point where this moment to will take on the greater significance of being a chapter in another story that I will tell from another place.
We continue sitting for a while, until the streetlights come on, eventually we begin to make our way back home. Past the university building where when the students graduate they throw eggs and flour all over them, past the Coco supermarket, which, being a sort of smaller supermarket is actually called a Chino here, mainly because these places are always owned by Chinese people. We pass one of the numerous cafés where they serve liters of beer in Styrofoam wrappings that keep them cooler. As we get to our door, I take out my key which is unlike any other I’ve ever seen, having a crated appearance, we call it the ‘moon’ key. I think to myself how these small details are just the beginning of another story