There's something going on here which isn't talked about. It's ingrained in this city's core and accepted as part of life by the people who suffer it's various indecencies and by those who profit from it. Some are born with it, others, like Pablo Escobar, are born without it and earn it through action. It is what keeps people saying todo bien in the streets while their professional or familial lives crumble and dissolve. It is the enemy of merit. It is rosca.
The dictionary defines it as 'the thread of a screw' but it's more commonly thought of as 'influence'. Americans, like myself, have trouble understanding the version of rosca that exists here. In Boston and other American cities, getting a job or being promoted usually depends on your abilities, relevant experience and contacts. Here, you can scrap the first two on that list in most industries. Here it doesn't matter what you've done or if you're more deserving than someone else or if you're more qualified; what matters is who you know. Nepotism, favoritism, biases and partiality are accepted parts of the game. In order to move up and accumulate power, you have to satisfy certain individuals.
Please take a moment to consider what it would be like to live inside this system. You work, effort, suffer, sweat and bleed your way through life without reaping rewards. You are principled, ethical, value oriented and 'good' and watch as your asshole neighbor or classmate or colleague or family member cruises to a good salary and passing grades while you remain stagnant. If you find your way into a position based on your abilities, it will be ripped away from you, you will lose your livelihood when a person who is more connected is 'recommended' for the position.
How does one accumulate rosca? By doing favors. The mafia bosses, politicians and the police/armed forces control the Central Bank of Paisa Rosca, and they are the people who need to pleased. If you work at a publicly funded university, for example, it's the city councilmen, the mayor's staff members or the local representatives.
The group that is not mentioned above is that of the powerful private citizens. They no longer actively control the flow of drugs through Medellin or the city government of Envigado or La Policia of Itagui or Bello but who can still make regular withdrawls from the Rosca Bank. It's this group that perhaps does the most harm in present day Paisa society. They're unmarked, without uniforms. They're sitting next to you at the bank or in the park. They are one of the reasons why citizens avoid substantive conversations regarding the many persistent evils of their city. There is a 'fear of the other' that runs through, not under but through, regular interactions here. Paisas spend time with family members and two or three good friends - nobody else can be trusted enough to allow for an honest exchange of criticisms, commentary and observations.
There were over 1,200 homicides last year in Medellin alone. Increases in violence in the barrios. Severe lack of medical services. Lack of educational resources for children. Children being abandoned on the streets by parents who can't afford to support them. Intellectuals and professionals who are prisoners within their national boundaries, unable to secure visas and passports. These issues not only aren't spoken about on the streets or in the panaderias, they also aren't reported in the news. Last night I asked two executives from a publicly funded energy and communications company based in Medellin, why it is so difficult to find unbiased media sources in Colombia. They chuckled and told me that here, being in the middle is not an option. The independent, investigative reporter can't survive. It's not that he can't get his writings published - he'll be killed.
And even as I write this I have, in the back of my head somewhere, a muted voice asking what I'll get out of publishing this on the web and if it is worth the potential risks. It seems far fetched; a neighbor finding out that I keep a blog, reading it, passing the info along to an interested party, and so on. It is far fetched, but not impossible, that there could be a backlash against this piece. Either way, it has taken my over a year to realize how this city is run and now that I know I can't just stay quiet.
It's disappointing and troublesome for the future of this scarred country. People are living in various degrees of fear of their neighbors, of their colleagues, of their 'friends' and of the police.
Thursday, July 14, 2011
Thursday, March 11, 2010
Shades of White
I saw different colors, you saw many shades of white. Lean toward the light.
In a world where the things you don’t see share your life with the most intimate relations, and where you look a man in the eyes and know he’s human, there blows a breeze that reminds us of other places, other lives, of fisherman sweating in dugout canoes for their families, of the plaid clothed skateboarders stroking infantile mustaches in Brooklyn, of the leather tanners stomping in colorful vats in a Moroccan downpour. It can carry you as far as you’ll go.
If everything is perception and perception is your own, forever your own, internal, malleable, bending the light toward your own eye, then it can indeed lift you for eternity or just a day. You say that there are some facts, some tangible things we all hold and know the spirit of, the things we base education and conversation on; the international situation, desperate as usual, and the Macintoshes of the Berkshires, and the color of clear sky, but I’m turning toward you now and saying, “That is bullshit”. That is a wonderfully comfortable illusion that at some point, freedom of soul and of vision can overcome and release a person from, beyond and beyond, toward dissolution into molecular omnipotence.
Tangiblists; float away, please! Come back renewed with eyes wide like Whitman!
Hold time, our favorite illusion, in a firm fist and squeeze the juice and pulp. And yes, no revelations here, not anything that the illuminated mediums have overlooked. Well documented and published por supuesto. But look at linear time and admit that possibly, as you’ve known it, it is a fear driven march toward death. “I have 72 years on this Earth and every tick of the clock is a minus sign”. Something like that. That is our motto and we’ve stuck to it, for worse.
What if time was a blending of the wisdom of ages, of connectivity between salt and rocks and fossils and us, of breath and smiles and wet kisses and sweat, of cloud bursts off the coast of Africa quenching distant cracked lands, of life continuing as it has, of whatever you want it to be as long as its yours, as long as its ‘hands’ are waving at you hello in the morning and goodbye after the last drop of whiskey. No fear, like the tee shirts or the socks. No limits and uncarved, an infinity pool overflowing, like your soul as it was before you learned.
In a world where the things you don’t see share your life with the most intimate relations, and where you look a man in the eyes and know he’s human, there blows a breeze that reminds us of other places, other lives, of fisherman sweating in dugout canoes for their families, of the plaid clothed skateboarders stroking infantile mustaches in Brooklyn, of the leather tanners stomping in colorful vats in a Moroccan downpour. It can carry you as far as you’ll go.
If everything is perception and perception is your own, forever your own, internal, malleable, bending the light toward your own eye, then it can indeed lift you for eternity or just a day. You say that there are some facts, some tangible things we all hold and know the spirit of, the things we base education and conversation on; the international situation, desperate as usual, and the Macintoshes of the Berkshires, and the color of clear sky, but I’m turning toward you now and saying, “That is bullshit”. That is a wonderfully comfortable illusion that at some point, freedom of soul and of vision can overcome and release a person from, beyond and beyond, toward dissolution into molecular omnipotence.
Tangiblists; float away, please! Come back renewed with eyes wide like Whitman!
Hold time, our favorite illusion, in a firm fist and squeeze the juice and pulp. And yes, no revelations here, not anything that the illuminated mediums have overlooked. Well documented and published por supuesto. But look at linear time and admit that possibly, as you’ve known it, it is a fear driven march toward death. “I have 72 years on this Earth and every tick of the clock is a minus sign”. Something like that. That is our motto and we’ve stuck to it, for worse.
What if time was a blending of the wisdom of ages, of connectivity between salt and rocks and fossils and us, of breath and smiles and wet kisses and sweat, of cloud bursts off the coast of Africa quenching distant cracked lands, of life continuing as it has, of whatever you want it to be as long as its yours, as long as its ‘hands’ are waving at you hello in the morning and goodbye after the last drop of whiskey. No fear, like the tee shirts or the socks. No limits and uncarved, an infinity pool overflowing, like your soul as it was before you learned.
Thursday, January 28, 2010
Tanning Toddler
"But somehow I know that only when it's dark enough can you see the stars"
MLK’s God and my spirituality and the three children corded to the sacks of vegetables and dirt on the over-sized and worn wheelbarrow coated in the calluses of the homeless and the flashes from cameras of empathetic visitors to the street who when passing by will sob desert sobs while quenching themselves at the oasis.
I gave them all the empties from our last party, but the trail of wretched warm beer traces their sojourn of sustaining love and suffering, past Patio Bonito, through the wind and night the forces them under the bridge and behind plywood and rusted metallic scraps until the equatorial sun smokes them out onto pavement and to work in dumpsters. Interminable clawing for monetized glass and crusted drool.
And this will go on for the entirety of the safely fastened toddler’s childhood until he decides or recognizes what has been handed to him at the get-go of our no-limit tournament. And if he nods in assent he will follow porous shadows that to us seem transparently bankrupt but to him promise change, freedom, opportunity. Armed and violent shadows, shadows addicted to self-implosion and degradation of spirit, twisted shadows, shadows unknown to the giant Bao of the African plain and scolded by the Red Wood, plagues incapable of providing respite in midday and burning in envy and the knowledge of deprivation after sundown.
But he has a choice, an option in the form of a moment or simple illuminated thought, a passing notion of appreciation for the afternoon breeze. Will he harness the light he perceives? It is beyond doubt that he is both capable and extremely unlikely to do so. Because the scalding shadow smiles with the horrible confidence of the house dictating the odds. Because the light is so foreign that he pours sweat under its clarity. Because he looks at his life and shudders at the climb that awaits him; from damp invisibility of the underground to the level of human connection through knowledge of the infinite. A vague and intimidating path.
And so the light passes over the young man’s rough fingertips to reveal the crevasses on his palms and the electric blue of angry veins throbbing in his forearms and biceps. Gradually he investigates his sore shoulders and screams at the wheelbarrow that his father found and that he was corded to, for its weight. And he breathes as he watches his chest expand and not contract. His stomach is muscular and his abdomen through his ribcage gaze almost coquettishly up at his face, tempting him to satisfy them with ravenous addition. And his quadriceps feel sturdy even as he sees his gray, destroyed Nikes and pushes the familiar pain running up from the arches of his feet through his chiseled calves and his hamstrings back into the cursed pavement.
And when its gone, its not to reappear. He has taken a step into a world that has begun to spin around him, where he is the center of something untouchable. His soul is brilliant yellows and greens. His mind is turning over itself not with joy but with the stepping stones to his own form of bliss. His ears take in what couldn’t be heard, and even the voices of his dying father who’s been dead and of his brothers who pull together in disillusionment equal to his vision are unrecognizable, like the foreign mumblings of ex-deities.
He loves them but can’t carry them. They must cherish their own light enough to allow it to glide them through the broken cobblestones, the asphalt, the clay, the dense matter of their prior existence. Each one of us glows but only some of us clean the windows.
MLK’s God and my spirituality and the three children corded to the sacks of vegetables and dirt on the over-sized and worn wheelbarrow coated in the calluses of the homeless and the flashes from cameras of empathetic visitors to the street who when passing by will sob desert sobs while quenching themselves at the oasis.
I gave them all the empties from our last party, but the trail of wretched warm beer traces their sojourn of sustaining love and suffering, past Patio Bonito, through the wind and night the forces them under the bridge and behind plywood and rusted metallic scraps until the equatorial sun smokes them out onto pavement and to work in dumpsters. Interminable clawing for monetized glass and crusted drool.
And this will go on for the entirety of the safely fastened toddler’s childhood until he decides or recognizes what has been handed to him at the get-go of our no-limit tournament. And if he nods in assent he will follow porous shadows that to us seem transparently bankrupt but to him promise change, freedom, opportunity. Armed and violent shadows, shadows addicted to self-implosion and degradation of spirit, twisted shadows, shadows unknown to the giant Bao of the African plain and scolded by the Red Wood, plagues incapable of providing respite in midday and burning in envy and the knowledge of deprivation after sundown.
But he has a choice, an option in the form of a moment or simple illuminated thought, a passing notion of appreciation for the afternoon breeze. Will he harness the light he perceives? It is beyond doubt that he is both capable and extremely unlikely to do so. Because the scalding shadow smiles with the horrible confidence of the house dictating the odds. Because the light is so foreign that he pours sweat under its clarity. Because he looks at his life and shudders at the climb that awaits him; from damp invisibility of the underground to the level of human connection through knowledge of the infinite. A vague and intimidating path.
And so the light passes over the young man’s rough fingertips to reveal the crevasses on his palms and the electric blue of angry veins throbbing in his forearms and biceps. Gradually he investigates his sore shoulders and screams at the wheelbarrow that his father found and that he was corded to, for its weight. And he breathes as he watches his chest expand and not contract. His stomach is muscular and his abdomen through his ribcage gaze almost coquettishly up at his face, tempting him to satisfy them with ravenous addition. And his quadriceps feel sturdy even as he sees his gray, destroyed Nikes and pushes the familiar pain running up from the arches of his feet through his chiseled calves and his hamstrings back into the cursed pavement.
And when its gone, its not to reappear. He has taken a step into a world that has begun to spin around him, where he is the center of something untouchable. His soul is brilliant yellows and greens. His mind is turning over itself not with joy but with the stepping stones to his own form of bliss. His ears take in what couldn’t be heard, and even the voices of his dying father who’s been dead and of his brothers who pull together in disillusionment equal to his vision are unrecognizable, like the foreign mumblings of ex-deities.
He loves them but can’t carry them. They must cherish their own light enough to allow it to glide them through the broken cobblestones, the asphalt, the clay, the dense matter of their prior existence. Each one of us glows but only some of us clean the windows.
Friday, January 22, 2010
Festival Verano
Yoho called my Colombian cell at 3:30pm and by 7:30pm Tom and I were waiting at the Estacion Norte bus terminal for our overnight ride to Necocli on the Caribbean coast. Between the time Yoho told me about the reggaetone and electronica music festival and the departure time of our bus, all I had to do was: convince Tom, (who hadn’t slept the night before), to join me on the adventure, buy a tent, gather food supplies and water, go the terminal to buy bus tickets, pack everything I had brought with me to Colombia, find a place to store my valuables, pay part of my tab at my hostel, and get back to the bus terminal. A calm four hours after a two hour sleep and plenty of socializing the night before.
The hassle of preparing for the Festival de Verano 2010 now seems negligible. We left Medellin at 8:30pm and arrived in the usually sleepy seaside town of Necocli 11 hours later after enduring a harrowing ride through switchback mountain passes at top speed in a full size bus that was passing every car and truck on the road around blind corners and along tiny, one lane “streets” running along deep crevasses and cliffs. The driver would wail on the horn as we careened around the corners, as if doing so would give the drivers coming down the mountain enough time to swerve off the road and at least die by their own accord and not in a head-on collision. I didn’t sleep a wink. I managed to force the fear of death deep enough inside to close my eyes at one point, but just at that moment (around 3am), the bus driver decided it was time to start bumping salsa and meringue music at full volume, a decision that provoked a collective groan from the Colombians and some fiery words of dismay and disbelief from Tom. Either way, I didn’t sleep. We stopped in the middle of the night at one of these anonymous restaurant/bar/bathroom/kiosk shops for about 15 minutes, during which the Paiso (man from Medellin) I’d befriended on the bus bought four Aguila beers (think Corona in a can), two for each of us, and proceeded to more or less force me to drink them with him one after the other.
Re-boarded the bus and headed deeper into the night, closer to the destination I knew nothing about, farther from the first-world, safe and modern feel of Medellin and its surroundings. We eventually arrived. The bus let us out onto a dusty street in a town that was waking up. A brown and white spotted horse galloped past us without a rider, as if in a rush to beat the morning commuters headed to imaginary jobs in some imaginary city somewhere to the east. We followed the horse after devouring an over-ripe mango and failing to juggle the Arsenal soccer ball (pelota) we’d brought along. It was about a ten minute walk to the polluted harbor, where the fishermen were loading the torn fishing nets and paddles and water into the tiny wooden vessels they’d spend the day in, alone out at sea. We looked at each other and decided that wherever we were, it wasn’t where we were supposed to be. We kept walking, ran into a guy who pointed us down a street, eventually entered a hotel where the owner refused us cups of coffee while drinking one of his own. We left, headed down the street in some direction Tom smelt out, and ended up by the cemetery.
As we headed toward the place of resting souls, full of overturned and moss covered headstones and tombs, Yoho, who’d arrived earlier in the morning, called. The only thing I was able to tell him was that I was at the cemetery. 30 seconds later we were on the back of a dirt-stained white pickup truck being steered by Pachu, an elderly and drunk man from the area who was apparently a distant relative of one of the guys in the cab of the truck. We veered left and right and came to a halt at El Mirador, the place where “it” was supposedly “going down”. We pitched our tents on a concrete roof overlooking a terrace that extended over the sea and a long stretch of beautiful beach. To the west we could see a large stage and speaker tower set up, out of place among the white caps and palm trees. Yoho, Jairo, Vince, Tom, Pachu and I went downstairs and ate a breakfast of pork back/fat, rice, beans, fried plantains and coffee, otherwise known as a bandeja. It was good and I felt like things were starting to come together.
Later on we played soccer on the beach with an elderly man and his family and then shared their fish and potato soup that they’d cooked over wood fire in a nearby palm grove. As we sat in that shaded place, watching the two sisters and their madre effortlessly shift their hips with the reggatone coming from El Mirador, I couldn’t help but have one of those moments that you sometimes have when traveling, when you step outside of yourself and think about where you are at that moment and where you’re from and smile because you know that it doesn’t matter and that all the things you see and have seen and all the people from your past and those that are in front of your face are all one, united by some force that is considered a trite and useless consideration in ‘the west” but still manages to persist and rotate with us on this Earth.
Nap in the hammock followed by a few beers and a rendezvous with Aguardiente Santa Clause and his gorgeous friends. “HO HO HO – you want shot Aguar gringo”?? We gathered our forces and hopped on the back of a pick-up truck headed into town after the sun had gone down. It had been transformed into a massive street party. The entire width of a small side street was covered in speakers and the dark women and men of Necocli and the surrounding towns were grinding and moving along the asphalt with broad smiles and knowledge of the primacy of the moment. A cock fight, party in the bull fighting ring and walk on the beach later and we were back at El Mirador, dancing with an aloof, sweat covered goddess and sharing another bottle of Aguardiente. Needless to say, I lost my sandals, my towel and my mind after a late night swim. We crashed before the sun came up, me in the tent on the concrete slab and Tom in the hammock by the sea.
Too many details and too many conversations later, I was playing beach soccer with Michel and Manuel, two 10 year old boys who could take most American men to school on the pitch. Marcela, Linda, Elba, the Stoic Indian, Ides, Mr. Anderson and the others soon joined in, some holding smoking joints and others toting hands covered in black ink. 6 on 6 turned into lunch by the back of the camp site, and that lunch birthed friendships and laughter that would last for the rest of the weekend and until even now, as I write from the apartment in Medellin. Marcela’s smile, the Stoic Indian’s flowing black locks, Elba’s dance moves; sacred images that came from nowhere to illuminate another sun-filled weekend in Colombia.
We cooked our meals as a family, in a cauldron hung between two branches over a fire made of palm leaves and wood from the surrounding forest. We ventured into town together and watched fire breathing madmen and jugglers and jewelry makers create a jubilant atmosphere. We shared bottles of Aguardiente and gave copitas to strangers and providers of the good energy we were breathing in. And we shared our lives with each other for that weekend, discovering that some of us had been traveling for 16 years across the continent with two children, while others were seeking a renewal of spirits and vibrancy, and still others a rebirth of imagination or a straight out rumba on the beach.
Life encompassed our camp site until one morning, while I sat watching Linda juggle her pins and Ides roll yet another massive joint, Jairo returned from a morning stroll along the shore. An 11 year old boy had been hit by a boat and had died upon impact. His father was on the shore and after a frantic sprint and swim he had managed to haul his son’s corpse through the rough surf and on to the sand as the sun rose. I sat on a wooden bench by my tent, unable to comprehend what had happened, unwilling to look death in the eye, feeling a wave of guilt sweep over me as I recalled the previous night’s debaucherous euphoria. A black boy had been hit in the head by a passing boat. He had died. He was dead.
I walked down the beach, looking through the infinite grains of sand, thinking only of death and not of renewal or of circular time or of karmic rebirth or of any comforting conceptions of innocence and youth exterminated. Red flames turned to green and I involuntarily stumbled toward the water and knelt there looking out at the horizon. Walt Whitman eventually came to me, teaching yet again about the sea’s memory and its appetite, its ability to consume and to reproduce and sustain. I still knelt, knowing the boy’s spirit had become part of the waves that crashed down upon me, along with souls long extinguished.
We boarded the bus that night after bidding farewell to Marcela, Stoicism and Black Palms and headed back to the City of Eternal Spring. Knowing what lay ahead, namely, certainty of a horrible death at high speeds along one of the winding switchbacks, I took a look at Tom and a deep breath and passed out. Nine hours later we we’d arrived to hear and watch and feel Medellin waking up, coming to its senses after a long weekend. The Black Sheep Hostel had a bed for Tom but not for me. I sat outside with Glen, an alcoholic Canadien ex-fugitive/homeless wanderer/oil rig worker and shared the morning’s first glass of Chilean wine with him. He asked about the weekend and I didn’t respond. He was satisfied and so was I. I swished the wine around and tasted my life as it unveiled itself once again.
The hassle of preparing for the Festival de Verano 2010 now seems negligible. We left Medellin at 8:30pm and arrived in the usually sleepy seaside town of Necocli 11 hours later after enduring a harrowing ride through switchback mountain passes at top speed in a full size bus that was passing every car and truck on the road around blind corners and along tiny, one lane “streets” running along deep crevasses and cliffs. The driver would wail on the horn as we careened around the corners, as if doing so would give the drivers coming down the mountain enough time to swerve off the road and at least die by their own accord and not in a head-on collision. I didn’t sleep a wink. I managed to force the fear of death deep enough inside to close my eyes at one point, but just at that moment (around 3am), the bus driver decided it was time to start bumping salsa and meringue music at full volume, a decision that provoked a collective groan from the Colombians and some fiery words of dismay and disbelief from Tom. Either way, I didn’t sleep. We stopped in the middle of the night at one of these anonymous restaurant/bar/bathroom/kiosk shops for about 15 minutes, during which the Paiso (man from Medellin) I’d befriended on the bus bought four Aguila beers (think Corona in a can), two for each of us, and proceeded to more or less force me to drink them with him one after the other.
Re-boarded the bus and headed deeper into the night, closer to the destination I knew nothing about, farther from the first-world, safe and modern feel of Medellin and its surroundings. We eventually arrived. The bus let us out onto a dusty street in a town that was waking up. A brown and white spotted horse galloped past us without a rider, as if in a rush to beat the morning commuters headed to imaginary jobs in some imaginary city somewhere to the east. We followed the horse after devouring an over-ripe mango and failing to juggle the Arsenal soccer ball (pelota) we’d brought along. It was about a ten minute walk to the polluted harbor, where the fishermen were loading the torn fishing nets and paddles and water into the tiny wooden vessels they’d spend the day in, alone out at sea. We looked at each other and decided that wherever we were, it wasn’t where we were supposed to be. We kept walking, ran into a guy who pointed us down a street, eventually entered a hotel where the owner refused us cups of coffee while drinking one of his own. We left, headed down the street in some direction Tom smelt out, and ended up by the cemetery.
As we headed toward the place of resting souls, full of overturned and moss covered headstones and tombs, Yoho, who’d arrived earlier in the morning, called. The only thing I was able to tell him was that I was at the cemetery. 30 seconds later we were on the back of a dirt-stained white pickup truck being steered by Pachu, an elderly and drunk man from the area who was apparently a distant relative of one of the guys in the cab of the truck. We veered left and right and came to a halt at El Mirador, the place where “it” was supposedly “going down”. We pitched our tents on a concrete roof overlooking a terrace that extended over the sea and a long stretch of beautiful beach. To the west we could see a large stage and speaker tower set up, out of place among the white caps and palm trees. Yoho, Jairo, Vince, Tom, Pachu and I went downstairs and ate a breakfast of pork back/fat, rice, beans, fried plantains and coffee, otherwise known as a bandeja. It was good and I felt like things were starting to come together.
Later on we played soccer on the beach with an elderly man and his family and then shared their fish and potato soup that they’d cooked over wood fire in a nearby palm grove. As we sat in that shaded place, watching the two sisters and their madre effortlessly shift their hips with the reggatone coming from El Mirador, I couldn’t help but have one of those moments that you sometimes have when traveling, when you step outside of yourself and think about where you are at that moment and where you’re from and smile because you know that it doesn’t matter and that all the things you see and have seen and all the people from your past and those that are in front of your face are all one, united by some force that is considered a trite and useless consideration in ‘the west” but still manages to persist and rotate with us on this Earth.
Nap in the hammock followed by a few beers and a rendezvous with Aguardiente Santa Clause and his gorgeous friends. “HO HO HO – you want shot Aguar gringo”?? We gathered our forces and hopped on the back of a pick-up truck headed into town after the sun had gone down. It had been transformed into a massive street party. The entire width of a small side street was covered in speakers and the dark women and men of Necocli and the surrounding towns were grinding and moving along the asphalt with broad smiles and knowledge of the primacy of the moment. A cock fight, party in the bull fighting ring and walk on the beach later and we were back at El Mirador, dancing with an aloof, sweat covered goddess and sharing another bottle of Aguardiente. Needless to say, I lost my sandals, my towel and my mind after a late night swim. We crashed before the sun came up, me in the tent on the concrete slab and Tom in the hammock by the sea.
Too many details and too many conversations later, I was playing beach soccer with Michel and Manuel, two 10 year old boys who could take most American men to school on the pitch. Marcela, Linda, Elba, the Stoic Indian, Ides, Mr. Anderson and the others soon joined in, some holding smoking joints and others toting hands covered in black ink. 6 on 6 turned into lunch by the back of the camp site, and that lunch birthed friendships and laughter that would last for the rest of the weekend and until even now, as I write from the apartment in Medellin. Marcela’s smile, the Stoic Indian’s flowing black locks, Elba’s dance moves; sacred images that came from nowhere to illuminate another sun-filled weekend in Colombia.
We cooked our meals as a family, in a cauldron hung between two branches over a fire made of palm leaves and wood from the surrounding forest. We ventured into town together and watched fire breathing madmen and jugglers and jewelry makers create a jubilant atmosphere. We shared bottles of Aguardiente and gave copitas to strangers and providers of the good energy we were breathing in. And we shared our lives with each other for that weekend, discovering that some of us had been traveling for 16 years across the continent with two children, while others were seeking a renewal of spirits and vibrancy, and still others a rebirth of imagination or a straight out rumba on the beach.
Life encompassed our camp site until one morning, while I sat watching Linda juggle her pins and Ides roll yet another massive joint, Jairo returned from a morning stroll along the shore. An 11 year old boy had been hit by a boat and had died upon impact. His father was on the shore and after a frantic sprint and swim he had managed to haul his son’s corpse through the rough surf and on to the sand as the sun rose. I sat on a wooden bench by my tent, unable to comprehend what had happened, unwilling to look death in the eye, feeling a wave of guilt sweep over me as I recalled the previous night’s debaucherous euphoria. A black boy had been hit in the head by a passing boat. He had died. He was dead.
I walked down the beach, looking through the infinite grains of sand, thinking only of death and not of renewal or of circular time or of karmic rebirth or of any comforting conceptions of innocence and youth exterminated. Red flames turned to green and I involuntarily stumbled toward the water and knelt there looking out at the horizon. Walt Whitman eventually came to me, teaching yet again about the sea’s memory and its appetite, its ability to consume and to reproduce and sustain. I still knelt, knowing the boy’s spirit had become part of the waves that crashed down upon me, along with souls long extinguished.
We boarded the bus that night after bidding farewell to Marcela, Stoicism and Black Palms and headed back to the City of Eternal Spring. Knowing what lay ahead, namely, certainty of a horrible death at high speeds along one of the winding switchbacks, I took a look at Tom and a deep breath and passed out. Nine hours later we we’d arrived to hear and watch and feel Medellin waking up, coming to its senses after a long weekend. The Black Sheep Hostel had a bed for Tom but not for me. I sat outside with Glen, an alcoholic Canadien ex-fugitive/homeless wanderer/oil rig worker and shared the morning’s first glass of Chilean wine with him. He asked about the weekend and I didn’t respond. He was satisfied and so was I. I swished the wine around and tasted my life as it unveiled itself once again.
Sunday, January 3, 2010
San Domingo
You pay for the Metro but not for the ride. Go to Acevedo and go to the green gondola and get on the cable car to the top of the favelas and to San Domingo. Get off there, in that place you're not supposed to be but should be. Talk to the old woman with cataracts and cluck with her chickens at some passing threat that can't touch you. Turn to the cracked face of the man whose seen brothers and sisters come and go and watch his eyes stand against the sun reflecting the crumbling brick of his home. Look above you at the chicas on their scrubbed concrete balcony glistening with that same sun and the same cracks and strength and power and knowledge. You need to breathe and to walk.
Boys are down the street playing next to the god-fearers praying for the moon, for food enough for their sons, for San Domingo and the freshness of its juices and the coldness of its beers. Put one foot after the other 'cause it's steeper than you dare to recognize. Beneath the pavement the laughter roars and as you descend you'll see the crystal street water's mystical source and those ninos with buckets overflowing and no shirts and no shoes. And then they've seen you and you're dodging some bullets that would splash to make you seem human and to let you know that you are, breathing, and living and pounding the pavement to avoid the next deluge of poor boys' joy. Your mate is soaked and holding tight to each drop, clinging and not letting go of what that was for him and for you.
Twirl three times and step right and you'll see guns. Assault rifles and semi-automatics. Shoot-out unannounced two days before left young men dead. Somebody says it's not safe. Old man says it's not safe here. Entiendo y gracias. Finish the comfortable layer that that beer is and that that cigarette was because now you need to go. Put it all down and walk a little quicker, two feet forward and two eyes scanning.
German Shepard chained to the roof, tortured and howling. Oval faced freckled mob-boss on the hood of the car that shouldn't be there. Cloud cover passes over. Blaring music somewhere too near though the one on the left is beautiful don't touch Indiana just pass through you need to go now. The empanadas look delicious next to the rabbit cage and the toddler's kaleidoscope. Id live again as her to know what she knows. Four feet, eight feet and pitter pat on the black echoing into the illusory silence of this brick and brown place beyond your world.
Make a joke and laugh 'cause you're a little lost. Come around one no-go corner but men you dont wanna see there are lingering and have got nothing better to do. Eyes down and back turned with ears piercing even the air's shrieks of shrill belonging. The common senses matter and the uncommon ones are there for the taking. Santa and Rudolph and plastic wreaths and candycanes ground you in the rarity and heat of your moment. The sleigh ain't coming so move. Down the hill, follow the cable car line above and now you're seeing the wardrobe. Another world. At the end of those wires.
Look behind you and towel off. You're stepping in.
Wednesday, December 30, 2009
Spirit 859
Waiting for Spirit alongside
Caribbean jeans
D&G studded sparkles
Handheld PS3s and WiFi waves
Keep the paintbrush stirring
Counter clockwise blacks and whites
Roll into storm clouds unsure of
Where to break
All preconceptions shatter and images
of life styles
muddle until dissolution
Educated caned black woman
Reads her verses and nothing else
New Balance and gold thongs and black Uggs
And Cololmbianos in argyle and silver chains
Adorning wrists and necks not so
Bronzed. Look of disgust
From the chica with those
Stalky black boots sickened by the calf but
Addicted to the toes
Party planner’s face disfigured by
Nights before days as he wheels and deals
Behind the homely woman’s
Uncapped visage and I’m uncorked
And the brute banging his soul against
A distant wall
Isn’t fighting, but all we know is
“Jenny, JENNY, JENNY! I just don’t
Know why you cant live in the now
I am now
And the only way for you, Jenny, to be good
is by being good
And changing. Change Jenny”
And I’m listening for more while he
Re-imagines her late night escapades
In faux concern and stinted sympathy –
Recalling his own
Abilities and tolerance and adaptations
His sacrifices endless over the expanse of
Their time
“Stop Jenny, just stop talking
I’m so far past that stuff of then
And even then I wasn’t there”
The abuse and control and manipulation
and reprimands
“I’m actually going to allow
You to be the woman you want to be
With your children –
It should be up to you Jenny –
They’re your children
HAVE I BEEN MEAN? HAS KENNY BEEN MEAN?
Don’t be sorry, no, not now
Don’t be sorry now
Don’t say it, do it, be it, be the
Now
Be here with Kenny.”
Waiting for Spirit 859 with me –
Be here with me, Kenny, and
Stop your excreting your pathetic self-loathing
Stop reading the text she sent you from his hosue
and be here
With me now – you, she, we could have
Been nice together but no! You wouldn’t
Allow it
so here I am going
To a tropical paradise, not now
But in 25 minutes, not now,
Not just yet.
Caribbean jeans
D&G studded sparkles
Handheld PS3s and WiFi waves
Keep the paintbrush stirring
Counter clockwise blacks and whites
Roll into storm clouds unsure of
Where to break
All preconceptions shatter and images
of life styles
muddle until dissolution
Educated caned black woman
Reads her verses and nothing else
New Balance and gold thongs and black Uggs
And Cololmbianos in argyle and silver chains
Adorning wrists and necks not so
Bronzed. Look of disgust
From the chica with those
Stalky black boots sickened by the calf but
Addicted to the toes
Party planner’s face disfigured by
Nights before days as he wheels and deals
Behind the homely woman’s
Uncapped visage and I’m uncorked
And the brute banging his soul against
A distant wall
Isn’t fighting, but all we know is
“Jenny, JENNY, JENNY! I just don’t
Know why you cant live in the now
I am now
And the only way for you, Jenny, to be good
is by being good
And changing. Change Jenny”
And I’m listening for more while he
Re-imagines her late night escapades
In faux concern and stinted sympathy –
Recalling his own
Abilities and tolerance and adaptations
His sacrifices endless over the expanse of
Their time
“Stop Jenny, just stop talking
I’m so far past that stuff of then
And even then I wasn’t there”
The abuse and control and manipulation
and reprimands
“I’m actually going to allow
You to be the woman you want to be
With your children –
It should be up to you Jenny –
They’re your children
HAVE I BEEN MEAN? HAS KENNY BEEN MEAN?
Don’t be sorry, no, not now
Don’t be sorry now
Don’t say it, do it, be it, be the
Now
Be here with Kenny.”
Waiting for Spirit 859 with me –
Be here with me, Kenny, and
Stop your excreting your pathetic self-loathing
Stop reading the text she sent you from his hosue
and be here
With me now – you, she, we could have
Been nice together but no! You wouldn’t
Allow it
so here I am going
To a tropical paradise, not now
But in 25 minutes, not now,
Not just yet.
No Time
Linger on here a while
No circle numbers
Infinite grains layered
Soaking interminably in give and take
Absorb ‘til full capacity and ring out
Splatter splash sing aloud
You’re here where you never
Thought you’d be
Supine to mid-leap and then
Roll into turquoise
You’re where you once dreamed
Tengo mangos y arroz con coco
Quieres una cosa magnifico?
I’ve got some sun lit poi for ya
Come get it – dive in and refresh
Rinse off and refill
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
