"How did his hand become crippled?", she asked. Perfect timing. Just as if it had been planned, the door came ajar. A Mom peeked in. He noticed his wife, thought better of the answer but, characteristically, did it anyway. "In a knife fight." The door shut quickly. Footsteps scurried away. "A night fight?" his little boy asked. "A knife fight," the older girl corrected, anxious not to break the momentum. The kids howled, wanting to know the details of a thing he had broached as a secret he would share with them. "Your daddy was in a knife fight?" Here he was, sitting in the little boy's cocoon of a room irresponsibly assailing their guileless overprotected upper class sensibilities with stories from the underbelly of his life. Why? They had stayed home on New Year's Eve just watching pay television and hanging out with the family. The holiday always made him maudlin about coasting down the other side of life's bell curve. It was a time when - as one friend put it - you found yourself reliving the top ten blunders of your life. The mistakes you made in your life, regrets with your parents and with your own kids seemed a cruel circle. He had been okay until this transcendental death scene in Little Women where one of them had died and the lights had dimmed. It had blind-sided him, pushing him over the holiday edge and flooding him with images of his own mother's death. His terminally ill mother who had died that year had hung on for weeks past the doctor's estimates. She had survived on droppers of water and morphine and grit, obviously terrified of what lay beyond and, characteristically, having her petulant way and refusing to go. She was staying, coño . When death finally had overcome her last defiant act that night, she had blown out all of the lights in his brother's house and took the house next to it too, plunging the gathering of relatives into darkness and the now wailing mourners into a scene from Dante's Inferno. Remembering that night and the events of those horrible weeks pushed him over the edge to his secret tears, sad memories and wells of regrets. He sat there watching the show through his tears. His wife and sister-in-law knew where he was. "I guess we'll just sit here and make believe we don't know that you're crying." They laughed nervously. "Let me put Carlos to bed," he said, excusing himself. The son, a five-year-old who had of late taken to fantasizing himself to be different animals, had also taken to sleeping on a pallet made on top his bed. "Help me build my nest. I'll be the baby bird and you be the papa bird." They fluffed their pillows into a nest, laying in the darkness, a dim nightlight their campfire. Sad and obsessed, blindsided by the reminders of life and his fear of mortality, he grasped for stories from the fountain of his youth - of fireflies in a Newark cemetery, of funerals for his sister's butterfly, of water balloon fights with his clan of cousins and brothers and sisters. Their closeness was cemented by this firelight chat as his memories spewed out in a conspiracy of revelation. The boy was curious. But more than that, he was patient well beyond his years, a father to the man who told him about life in the North East, of universes far far away in a time long forgotten but now shared in this their secret first communion. The father mused at how much of his life he had managed to change and how he had changed with it. "You know that when I was a kid aunt Lydia didn't live with us? She lived with tia." The child thought a minute. "Was titi adopted?" The man thought about his oldest sister who called their mother tia and their tia, mami. He didn't go into their special bond, each the product of a different failed marriage. Not that his other brothers and sisters ever treated him differently, if anything they were reverential. It never occurred to any of them, including himself, that he was anything but a full-fledged brother. But, even though he was the oldest brother in a latino family, it was they who protected him from the old man's mistreatments. But his sister was special. She was the oldest, but she wasn't there. He always regretted not having had her with him all of the time. He understood the pain of her isolation and abandonment. He never forgave his mother for giving her away, for making all of the mistakes a peasant girl might make when she lands in another century, trades one jungle for another. He didn't go into the violent fights that had always divided the family. Either his mother had abandoned his sister or his aunt had stolen her, he wasn't sure these days about anything his mother had told him. "No, baby, that's just the way things worked out." The child's face betrayed that he didn't understand but he said nothing. The mental journey landed the father on the first time he met the other side of his family. Where the countryside houses had no running water, no glass in the windows, no floor coverings and had made him long to be back in Jersey City. The parselas, agrarian reform homesteads reserved by the government to insure the very poor had land, were carved into the clay bluffs and overlooked the sugarcane central, the kids a wild bunch of urchins, his father's wife a shy and gentle lady. He went to see his grandmother. From the minute he began the walk to her house he could feel the intensity of her stare. She waited for him on the veranda dressed in a simple cotton smock, her long gray hair pulled back in the Pentecostal style, her hair and aquiline nose making her look like a dignified Indian chief. But as he neared, she broke. She squirmed with obvious anticipation, jumping up and down like a Snoopy-footed four-year-old. She cried immense tears of joy. "Hola, Abuelita ." "I've been waiting for you all my life," she said, crying tears of joy and hugging him tightly. "I swore I wouldn't die until I saw you." She made up for all of the years of failed grandmotherly doting and they loved each other for finally filling a void, but he left her within a few months and never saw her again. Thinking about her made him angry and sad. He focused on his dad. "You want me to tell you about the first time I ever met my father?" The darkness intensified. The boy's face became somber. It was a flood of soporific memories like bad writing or a shitty Grade B movie script: The car dogging the street like the constant tropical sun that eventually burns away the impertinent morning chill; the license tag, its color, inscription, authorizing its languid movements in their uptight neighborhood of burglar bar decorated, bunker-looking concrete homes; the passengers craning their necks like tourists misplaced in this suburban geometry; one wearing a pava, a straw hat and the cultural equivalent of a Texan's Stetson. "It's a publico . They must be looking for a fare," the younger teenager said. They watched from the slab of their flat faux porch, two boys, twin gargoyles in canvas wingchairs....
"I didn't meet my father until I was sixteen. I quit high school and joined my mother in..." The door opened and his wife and niece entered. "What are ya'll doing?" Curtly he told her the obvious, that they were sharing a private moment. "I'm telling Carlos stories about when I was kid." He was passive about the interruption. "Can Grace join you guys?" "Sure." The birds made a space in the nest for her. "Start the story again so Gracie can hear it," the little boy said. "I never knew my dad when I was growing up." They were quiet and uneasy. "I only had a picture of him as a young man." "Was he my age?" the four-year-old boy asked. "He was a man, baby." "Was he fifty?," the girl asked. "Fifty? That's OLD," Carlos said. The father laughed. "You know what baby? I'm fifty." It was an admission of his youth, not his age. "I guess he was somewhere between twenty and thirty years old. The photo was the only father that I knew". He remembered how he had carried the picture in his wallet like a valuable religious artifact. A saint who never answered his prayers, or his letters. The prodigal dad. "When I was sixteen I moved to the island and sent my father a letter but I never got an answer. I was there six or seven months when a taxi pulled up in front of the house. The driver, a little white-haired man, asked for me. It was my dad." He flashed on the real west side story, of accounts of weapons and fights, of his father climbing up fire escapes to drag his young bride home from the refuge she had taken with her sisters. Of the commotion when he went into his cousin's window. Of other stories. "I didn't know a lot about my dad. I knew that he played the guitar and that his hand was crippled because he had been in a knife fight when he was a young man. He was a Romeo and supposedly a real man, a macho. He played the guitar with his barber's comb. When the driver walked up he shook my hand and told me that he was my father but I already knew." "Because of his crippled hand, right?" The kids were excited. "I almost fainted. My knees got weak and I wanted to sit down. I waited for this moment all of my life and the whole thing didn't last more than five minutes." "Did he come inside to meet your mom?" "We just stood out on the street. He asked me how I was. I said 'fine' and that was it. His car was full of people he was bringing to the airport from the other end of the island and everyone was looking at us. There I was out on the street feeling tiny and sad, happy and embarrassed. He told me I was always welcome at his house and that was it. He left. Later I got in a real big fight with my step-dad and I left the house to live with him and his family but that didn't last too long cause I left to join the air force. I was on my own by the time I was seventeen." That's when they had asked him how his hand had gotten mangled and when he had told them about the "knife fight". He had neither the time nor the inclination to tell them the whole sordid story, that really would have been irresponsible. But it was a good beginning. It was time to share with the little guy just who he was and, maybe, help him understand how he'd gotten to the present. Their mothers burst into the room, a maternal swat team come to rescue the kiddies from the pervert who was telling them who knows what. "We came to find out just what it is that you're telling the kids." Each mother took protective custody of her child. Away they went for debriefings, a deprogramming, if need be. The Dad laughed for a long time. Hysterically, almost. It wasn't that funny but he couldn't stop laughing. He laughed as he undressed for bed. He guffawed while he brushed his teeth and made the necessary preparations for his usually fitful sleep, for his encounter with the frightening chasm of the night. But this time he had no room for the fear of the void. He was still terribly amused and upbeat about the whole affair - at himself, the kids, their moms, their wonderfully middle class lives. MY FAMILY. He lay in bed, closed his eyes and for the first time in years remembered only the pleasant things about his parents, how much he owed them and how much like them he was. He remembered that he loved them and wished them a happy new year. Then he slept.
The Day Doña Irma Died by Kathryn Runco It was hot and there were too many people and the unexpected had happened. Doña Irma was not dead and didn't seem to be in any hurry to die. In fact, she seemed determined to the last shred of her diminished strength to keep on living despite the agony she must have been enduring. It wasn't going to be a pretty or peaceful death. She was DYING. In pain, in confusion, suffering. And fighting to hold on. The woman was there because her husband had phoned her office days before. "She's dying" he had said. And "Find Zack, get him some clothes for his grandmother's funeral and get on a plane." She had done those things. She had closed her office. Packed a black dress. Found her stepson and sent him to buy a blazer and some khakis. Reserved plane tickets, held a rental car at the Tampa airport and made hotel reservations. Because she was a Southern woman she knew that death required food and liquor and coffee. Along with the black dress, she packed her cookbook so that she could glaze a ham or bake a cake--the ritual preparation of food required of all adult Southern women when there is a funeral to throw. There is comfort in ritual, for those performing the ritual, at any rate. Doing the familiar acts of cooking and serving food, making coffee, pouring a drink served to reassure her that nothing has really changed and that grief and heartbreak and untied ends were not at the doorstep. And because her husband's family was huge and noisy, a retreat to the kitchen could provide some time alone, down time from the hysteria that she expected to accompany Doña Irma's death. But that is not what happened, at least not immediately. "You should see her. She looks like a skeleton." Her husband's eyes were wide and scared and he looked like a little boy. He had been there for days on the death watch. He had seen enough of the suffering and was ready, maybe even panicked, for it to end. But it wasn't going to end that day. Or the next. Or for many more days. So she saw her mother-in-law and her husband had been right. All that was left of the fat little lady was a skeleton and that skeleton was not at anything even approaching rest. Doña Irma was in pain. She was dehydrated because her throat and stomach could not accept food or fluid. She was hot and her skin was mottled. She did not breathe easily and she choked on bile so black and vile that her daughters and daughters in law and grand daughters had to hold tissues soaked with bay rum to their faces sometimes. But she could talk a little and she could hang on to the life force. The woman joined her sisters-in-law and, together, they watched and helped and provided awkward nursing. None of them were trained in caring for a woman so ill, but they did what they could. Ice chips. Tiny sips of sweet, thick Puerto Rican coffee. Sponges soaked in drops of morphine. They tried to ease her. They encouraged her to let go, to allow herself to stop suffering. They all secretly wondered if that was the right advice. They were (mostly) her daughters-in-law. Did the women married to her children really have the right to tell her to die? Whether or not, they told her....begged her. She was suffering and they were suffering and the children and the grandchildren couldn't have held out for much more of it, so they asked her to give up and go to God. She did her best not to accommodate them or God in that request. The woman probably knew Doña Irma least of all of the woman attending her. She was the most newly married into the family. The woman knew some family history and some she did not know. She had never lived in the same city nor visited with the old lady much. But the two women shared some things beyond the matriarch's oldest son and youngest grandson. They shared a hardness of spirit and a huge streak of stubbornness. They were tough broads, both of them, and neither were inclined to give an inch. Through the woman's pregnancy of that youngest grandchild, they had worked out an arrangement. The woman would not speak her broken Spanish to Doña Irma and the old lady would not speak her broken English to her daughter-in-law. So they spoke in different languages, understood each other perfectly and maintained their respective high grounds. A stand off. A pyrrhic victory for them both. Maybe if there had not been so much high ground the younger could have explained to the elder what she had seen of her husband's wounds and the elder could have understood just how deep those wounds ran. Maybe the elder woman could have explained some of the mystery of her life and warned against wanting too much and about the dangers of being mistaken and stubborn at the same time. But those things never happened. Doña Irma won the battle. She never spoke a word of English to the woman during all of those terrible days of the death watch. The woman spoke deathbed Spanish to her mother-in-law. "Abre su boca" when it was time for the morphine sponges and " Quiere agua, Doña?" She spoke soothing words learned from the other women when the old lady choked. The old lady would respond sometimes with a "Si" or "Cafe, por favor". And one hot bright afternoon when the woman thought she would scream from the heat and the crowd of in-laws and from being a witness to such prolonged agony, "Kathryn es muy bonita, muy bonita". Doña Irma had never told the woman before that she thought her pretty. It kept the woman from screaming and it made her cry. The woman's intimacy with her husband was routine and "regular". The normal exchanges of confidences and secret pain, revelations of anguish shared between spouses were a part of their marriage. The knowledge of the other person that was the product of living together; which buttons to push and which to avoid was a part of their bond. The intimacy of another person's family was not so familiar to the woman. Discovering the scars which transcended the individual and marred the entire group was not unknown to her but she was not prepared to experience such an intimate and enormous group revelation. Seeing the levels of fear and anger and loathing and love that happens only in an immediate family and the knowledge that these emotions were bared to her only as happenstance of time and place was harrowing. These people were suffering and hurting each other, themselves, their children, and she could not tell them what she saw happening because she was not one of them. Only a daughter-in-law. And so she did what she could to comfort her husband and his family. She cooked gringo food for the family because she couldn't cook for their palates. She held Doña Irma's hand and chipped ice and wiped the dying old lady with cold clothes. She would have changed the diapers but Doña Irma was so dehydrated that there was seldom a change needed. She prayed for an end to the agony and for the old lady to reach enough peace that she would finally let go. But she could not tell the old lady's children to lay off each other and to stop looking back. It wasn't her place; it wasn't her family; they weren't her scars; Doña Irma wasn't her mother. The woman, one of the sons and his wife were there when the old lady died. There had been some scares in the preceding days when the old lady choked horribly and had to be turned over, the daughters-in-law raking out the bile that clogged her throat. There were times when it did not seem that Doña Irma could possibly wake and speak again because no one, even she, could breathe so little and be in so much pain and keep living. But in the end, she drew a slow breathe, exhaled it, and her chest did not rise again. After a few moments the son felt for the pulse in her throat and when he did not find the rhythm, the woman walked out of the bedroom and into the kitchen to tell the other sons, drinking at the table, that the struggle had ended. She wondered at their shock. "What have they expected all this time?" she thought as the sons rushed to the back of the house and as she poured herself a glass of the bourbon left sitting on the table. The brothers and sisters, spouses, grandchildren poured into the stifling bedroom to be with the old body, to kiss her goodbye. The woman took her bourbon to the patio and sat by the pool, wanting to be away from the grief and the crying grandchildren and the noise brought on by the death. She wanted to sit in the hot, damp night and be alone but because the old lady's spirit was so strong, because she was so stubborn and so afraid to die, it would not be that easy. The old lady's soul took with her the electricity in the house abruptly, leaving the hot house without air conditioning and light and scaring the shit out of her family. In the hot dark hysteria, the woman found her husband and they laughed because they were tired and spooked and because the grief was escalating all around them. Their laughter was not understood by the others but the family had spent the last weeks not understanding each other and not trying very hard to make sense of all of their shared scars and pains and love and hopes. It was not to be expected that the woman's laughter with her husband would be understood nor did it matter. What happened next was also routine, "regular". A funeral was planned. Flowers were ordered. Aunts and uncles and cousins were called. The children of Doña Irma buried her and with her they buried the hope of reconciling the mystery and pain of the life they had spent with their mother. They lost with her much of their collective hope of understanding their mother and her life and they wounded each other deeply in the process. In the end, they couldn't even agree on the pronunciation of their last name, some preferring the Spanish inflection, others the English. The woman did not stay for the funeral because she would not willingly witness any more grief and would not watch the brothers and sisters strike out at each other. She left the family a few years later, with regret. They were loving people who had been good to her. They had beautiful names and their mothers' eyes and they had shared with her their culture, one of their men, and the intimacy of the death of their matriarch. She would be forever bound to them through emotion and through the blood of her son and she would always wish that she could have told them, on the day that Doña Irma died, to lay off each other and to stop looking back.
ICE is here In trying to understand what, if anything, the judge in Wisconsin did or didn't do to obstruct justice, I tripped over what for her may well end up being what caused her to either make a bad mistake or engage in legally protected conduct. Apparently there is a long standing issue with arrests in their courthouse as a safety policy issue. Judge Dugan, was holding court when she was told that "ICE is here". Judges can be quite prickly when it disrupts the flow of court. She went outside to talk to the arrest team and was told that they were there to effectuate an arrest and, when informed that they did not have a judicial warrant but an administrative warrant, directed them to the Chief Judge (who told the agent that they were working on a system to address the issue of arrests in their courthouse). While that was happening, the judge directed the person who the agents were seeking to go out a side door. He was chased and arrested. His due process kicked in. The complaint was made against the judge, she was arrested, and due process kicked in. She may be convicted or not but she will be protected by the rule of law, the way it should be. "ICE is here", though, that made a connection to two different episodes in my life that I link metaphorically with that statement. The first one was in Cuba: "NACRA," she said, her eyes now telegraphing utter fear. The word had no meaning to me. It was in response to my questioning what was happening. One minute it was just another swanky bar in Havana's Hemingway Marina. Yachts from all over the world, here to take part in two of Cuba's tourist draws, fishing and sex. There's a flurry of activities, an ambiance full of music, drinking, dancing, your typical bacchanal. I am having a nice time talking with this young lady. We had been sitting blissfully in Chan Chan, their very fancy club. And suddenly, a deathly pall came over the whole place. But I couldn't tell why. While the activities continued seemingly uninterrupted, I felt the room temperature drop and the hair on the back of my neck stand up. "NACRA," she repeated. "The secret police. They've entered the room. They've entered the room." In their jungle they are adept at spotting things dangerous. It's how you survive. The other in Honduras, where I had gone to interview witnesses: I knew I had screwed up. His eyes flashed pure evil, pure hatred. He looked at the other officers in his group making some sort of calculation. They had been stationed maybe 50, 75 feet away, stopping other cars. He pondered killing me. And I thought back to all of the times that my PTSD wariness had supposedly kept me safe and wondered how the fuck I was sitting here on a road - in a convertible Mustang - in Honduras - talking shit to a cop. "You should be ashamed of yourself", I had told him. "You're a police officer". I chided him for asking me for a bribe and disgracing his country. A bribe that probably wouldn't have cost me more than $20 was now going to cost me my life. And for a few seconds I tasted my last moments. And for another excruciatingly long time, also probably just a few seconds, he calculated killing me and finally let me go, probably because I had not wounded his pride in front of his fellow officers. Lost, unfortunately, in this the most recent kerfuffle is the fact that the Trump administration is at war with all of our institutions, most recently the judiciary. As is their practice, they seize on instances where the nuances get lost in immediate theatrics. It's still a stretch to compare our system with Cuba's or Honduras' but vigilance, especially given the jackboot parallels we see daily, is definitely called for. Don't let your middle class entitlement fool you, Ice is Here.
That Was Not A Deportation I kept seeing that Obrego-Garcia had been "deported" but it sounded from everything that I had read more like he was kidnapped. There is a big distinction between the government going through legal process and just Shanghaiing and disappearing someone. The file in PACER bears out that this was no deportation. (Obrego-Garcia's case is drawing most of the heat for the obvious: the "authority" the Trump administration is using doesn't apply to someone from El Salvador as opposed to Venezuela. But the Due Process issue is just as relevant to the Venezuelans accused of being tren de aragua gang members.) The government's lawlessness can be traced to January 20. Up to that point, the legal process had been proceeding as intended: Obrego-Garcia, who had left El Salvador when he was 16 years old and had been living in this country ever since 2011 got picked up some eight years later at a Home Depot and accused of being a member of MS-13; the government moves for his removal; he appears for his first meeting, asks for bond, submits 70 pages of evidence in support; the government objects to him being released, maintaining that he was a gang member on the basis of him having a Chicago Bulls hat and a hoodie as well as some unsubstantiated information tying him to another part of the country that he's never been; he files for asylum and the withholding of removal based on the protections afforded under the Convention Against Torture; the hearing, which spans over two days, results in the withholding of removal. The government does not appeal. Obrego-Garcia eventually married, had a child, had been fully compliant with his ICE check in requirements, had never been arrested or charged with any crime in the United States (or in El Salvador). The question of his supposed gang membership off the table. Until March 12th, 2025. After completing his shift, Obrego-Garcia got picked up by agents and told that his "status had changed". No hearing. No request to bring him back to the immigration court, etc. He is whisked away by masked men, no mention of where he is going, eventually finding himself in a prison notorious for its cruelty. A solution worthy of Pontius Pilate but that is no "deportation"; that is a rendition.
The Booze Run
"So, what did you get?" We were returning triumphant, the vanguard of a teenage booze run. We were showing our booty when Lenny chimed in. "You would not fucking believe what just happened to us. We had just gotten down to the Village when.....," he blurts out, "Did you know there are Black queers?"
They look at me for confirmation, probably because the idea of Black men as anything but warriors in 1950s Downtown Jersey City was a foreign notion. "True," I said. "We were in front of Ducky's Pizza when this skinny little fop pops up and plants himself right in front of us. He's maybe 20, 22. We don't know what he wants. He's just standing in our way, not saying anything. He has his elbow on his hip and his hand, palm up, in a very nancy pose. He's dressed in one of those pastel and shiny ski jackets like the ones you see in Macy's commercials, nothing anyone around here wears, for sure. 'Give me some money' he says. Dipshit here gives him some of our money."
Lenny protests. "It was just 50 cents."
"Anyway," I continue, "He holds out the money in his palm and just stares at us. We don't have a clue. And then, he laughs. He says 'Be a man, fight for what's yours'. He gives Lenny back the money. He asks us what we're doing down there, we tell him that we're out looking for someone to buy us some booze. He volunteers to do it. We give him our money. Into Ducky's he goes."
"And then it gets even weirder", I continue. "So, now we're just killing time and you know how its dark over there on First Street? When our eyes get used to it, we see that there's a bunch of people at the corners of the buildings. They're couples. About eight of them, Black couples, and they're men, Black men - and they're making out."
"We want to leave but we're want our booze, so we wait. But they aren't just kissing and making out. They're all dressed alike, in some sort of uniform. They're not in trench coats, but capes, and they're not wearing stingy brims, they're wearing berets, black ones. And at one point, this guy, he must be their leader, he comes down the sidewalk. His beret is red and his cape is lined in red satin and it's like he is making an entrance. He stands on the sidewalk, he extends his arms straight out, he is using his cape like he's some giant bat; another guy walks up and into him. They embrace. They start kissing. The wings swallow him up."
"I have never seen men kissing. I'm freaking out. Just about then our guy came back with our booze. So now we're centered on putting stuff into our pockets and down our pants and trying to get the hell out of there. Out of nowhere this big booming voice roars 'who the fuck are you?'
It's Red Beret. He looks even scarier up close, huge and Black like a Mighty Joe Young, but even weirder in his cape and beret. And, we hadn't noticed it, but the four of us are now in the center of a ring and surrounded by these guys. We have no idea what the fuck is getting ready to jump off."
"And then the twink comes to our rescue. 'Tangerine, Tangerine honey, it's okay'. He explains. 'They were looking to score some booze and I was helping them.' It seems like forever but eventually he calms down. He gives a signal. The circle parts and leaves just enough room for us to leave single file past this group of men in capes. We start running and don't stop till we get back here."
On PTSD In 1954 we lived in Hoboken, the same year they filmed On The Waterfront there. I was about nine years old. Mami had worked at the Tootsie Roll Factory for a brief time but mostly she stayed at home raising us. She and her sisters had learned to sew on the island; young peasant girls doing piecework as a survival skill. But, here, caste could not hide the fact that my mother was a world-class couturier. Mostly it was family stuff. Whenever the next victim decided that she was going to get married, she would come to my mother. They would go off in a gaggle - the girl, her mom, Mami - to New York, to scope out the finest stores and pick out the dream wedding dress. Price was no object. She would come home and duplicate it immaculately. She was a legend, She had a flair for organization - and control. She was our family’s event planner and in complete charge of whatever event was happening. Everything, down to the little swans with the almonds and the little organza bags, the fake carnation boutonnieres, white ribbons with the couple’s names, the cake from Valencia Bakery; all of the Puerto Rican accoutrements of weddings, that was her gig. Not that she practiced alone. She had co-conspirators, Tias Celina and Blanca usually, sometimes Tia Viňa or some random cousin. Normally these projects would have been done at someone else’s house, but this day they had come to Hoboken and our cramped little apartment. Tia Celina brought along my cousin Ray. My mother's nickname for Ray was Dennis the Menace. She tried to keep us apart as he was a trouble magnet and I was often his foil. Whatever problem others might manage to miss found him. He was my hero. We were bored. The women, preoccupied with the project and their bochinches, either let us go out or we escaped, not sure which, but we went off to discover the neighborhood. Ray’s misdeeds were always centered on his overactive mind. He would have some project or some little thing to do, some button to push, line to cross, a query that had up to that point been unanswered. "Let's go spelunking,” he said. I didn't know what spelunking was but he told me we were just going out to discover what was out there, lack of caves be damned. We wandered around our decrepit neighborhood, eventually coming up on two duplicate four-story federal townhouses. They were abandoned but in the process of repair. One of them looked like it was about to fall down. His eyes lit up and with that devilish grin said “Come on. Let’s find something to make a bow and arrow.” “I'm not going in there,” I said. I did not share his genius for trouble or his bravura. The initiative was always his. He was the gutsy one, the fearless one. “Aw, you chicken shit.” He was in there for the longest time. I paced nervously, pissed that I hadn't gone in there with him, demoralized, alone, afraid, ashamed. He finally returned and wanted to go into the other building. It looked like it was just about finished with the rehab. I thought, “well, that one I'm not afraid of.” We went in. We were up on the third floor when the front door slammed. Looking down the banister we could see two workmen, two young guys coming up. We hid in a closet. We hid in there for five or ten minutes - it seemed like forever. “Fuck this,” Ray said, taking out a tiny one or two inch bladed Boy Scout knife. I wanted to cry. Off he went to confront them while I stayed in the closet. Alone, I didn’t last long. I gave myself up. They had Ray and were trying to figure out what to do with us. They terrorized us for about an hour or two; they put us up against a wall, slammed a shovel on the concrete over our heads, the rubble going down our backs and into our shirts. They cut our hair. Frightened out of our wits, we were going to jump out of this third or four-story window. They realized that and took us down to this creepy basement. They made us dig our graves. They wanted us to suck their dicks and all manner of crazy stuff. I finally convinced them to let us go, that I wasn't going to say anything, that all I wanted to do was just to be left alone. Ray agreed. They took us straight to our mothers and told them that they had found us in their building. The minute the door closed, Ray ratted them out. The police came and arrested the guys. They had a court date. We didn't go. It was a big inconvenience and, besides, “nothing had happened”. Hoboken had been a nightmare. Papo (and maybe Janet and I) got polio, Eggy asthma, and this. We moved to downtown Jersey City. But it didn’t end there. We had been in our new school maybe two weeks and Eggy and I were in a nearby candy store. I had only casually noticed the guys in the back playing cards. I don't know if they saw me and started the story just to scare me or if it was just another cosmic incident. But their conversation sounded way too familiar. They were talking about how they'd scared these little Spic kids. I looked over and it was them. I was in a panic. Our family moved again. But only physically. Emotionally, I’m still there. I cry at the drop of a hat. The fear that this incident implanted in me I have only recently recognized as a life template and something about which to be conscious. I am constantly forecasting disaster even in the mundane. Had I been on guard, I tell myself, had I been wary, been vigilant, that wouldn't have happened to me. I blame the victim. It has taken me years to bring a bit of accommodation to my PTSD, to sort out my anxiety into tiers of reality - from “Don’t be ridiculous, that brick is not going to fall out of the mortar from that building and kill you” to “It’s probably not cancer that your head is throbbing”. Still, it is always a struggle to remember that it’s not real. Maybe. I am a work in progress but my insanity and I have reached a modicum of stasis. I credit being removed from that environment, of now having a pretty pleasant life, a wonderful family and friends that shower me with love and, thankfully, boatloads of understanding.
The driving lesson. When I was about 15, my family moved back to Puerto Rico. I stayed with my sister Lydia so I could finish high school, and of course, proceeded to act out horribly and do all sorts of terrible things to her and my brother-in-law. I finally ended up leaving Jersey City early, using the excuse that Mami had gotten cancer, and that I was supposedly upset and that was a reason I was acting out. I quit high school not even a month before I was supposed to graduate. We were living in Bayamon which is a relatively big city of mostly modest suburban cookie cutter homes. I started back with the horrible relationship I had with my stepfather, which had never been good. He and I were always at war. I was I'm sure, a giant pain in the ass and here we were in this concrete bunker of a house that was not much better than a prison cell and with not much to do. Armando was a brusque and kind of ignorant man who never missed, it seemed to me, an opportunity to show me his disdain. He had favorites, even amongst his own kids. Over the years we learned to manage that tendency, manipulating him to get some favorable dispensation (like getting to watch a certain TV program) by getting the favored child to ask for it. My brothers, the two next older children, were protective of me and we would conspire to get things through them, the three of us, mainly the boys. Janet was always a mama's girl and was always the one that snitched us out but we boys pretty much hung together. I was just coming into driving age but had no driving experience. My brother Papo, two years younger, was allowed to practice his driving. That was surprising as my stepfather was a fanatic about his cars; they were his babies, his earthly capital. This man, born in 1898, had been an orphan peasant child, a street beggar who had migrated to the states as a migrant worker and made his way as a solid postal employee. He had literally pulled himself up by the bootstraps. His prized possession always were his vehicles. He kept them immaculate. He was a kid about them. Now retired and back in the homeland, his everyday consisted of sitting on the little concrete slab of a porch and carport, shining his car and drinking beer. This day was of little difference. He and his cousin were drinking beer, shooting the shit, passing time. Papo jumped at the invitation to take the car for a spin and I accompanied him. Away from the house, he asked me if I wanted to drive. We switched seats. I stalled the car. Nose up. On a hill. I had no idea what to do. I panicked. My little brother tried to calm me down. "Just put it in reverse. Clutch in. Make sure the ignition is on. Pop the clutch when I tell you." The car started a slow roll but soon we were flying down this hill with me trying to keep it in the road and my brother keeping watch for traffic behind us. "STOP!!!!" he yelled. I slammed on the breaks but it was too late. Impact. And there it was, the perfect Ferris Bueller moment; My stepdad, in what is symbolically the totem of his world achievements and now a metaphor for the state of our relationship. I had t-boned his car and he was pinned. He is cursing, fuming, his cousin laughing hysterically. We had been gone long enough for them to come looking for us and I had managed to hit the one person in the world in Puerto Rico who hated my guts and survived only because he was pinned inside. I moved in with my father soon after.
Trump's Gunboat Diplomacy We got to yesterday in exactly the same way and for the same reason some folks are responding to this nightmare of "diplomacy". Blind fealty. Wasn't the responsibility to make that deal happen in the hands of the host? Zelensky, also a head of state, was their guest. He went there willingly and apparently ready to deal. Who really bears the fault that this fell apart? This (and Greenland, Panama Canal, Canada) is just the return of (the oxymoronic) gunboat diplomacy, the big guy picking on the little one. This time for the whole world to see. Did Trump and Vance think haranguing and gaslighting him - not coincidentally in front of a phalanx of cameras - was going to work? This guy has been knee-deep in blood. Trump staged a photo-op, a show of what he supposes is strength and it worked, but only for the already converted. A "great Job" indeed! It was a Machiavellian maneuver designed to give him cover for abandoning an ally and, as most of his apologists note, the elimination of an expense. It was a move driven by budget-balancing dirty dog(e) motives with no thought about the future costs. What they should be asking is what did they get, really get? At what expense? Remember, how he brought worldwide respect the last time out? Of course you do; if you are a true believer. MAGA redux. Who is the one risking a world war? Who was the adult in the room? There is no better example of the criticisms of Trump by many of his former cabinet when they criticize Trump for being purely transactional (and dangerous, and unwell, etc). Asked about the consideration of future Russian incursions his response was "What if a bomb drops on your head?" This is a man who knows no history and has no depth to him. He is a man-baby that can't think down the road past his own needs. He needs a diaper change. Unfortunately, the stink will be with us for at least another year and a half.
Clowning for dollars
As a salve for my sanity I tell myself that the country is probably in far better shape than I fear, that it's just the price I pay for my left/TDS. It's me, I've paid too much attention to the news and political commentary.
And Facebook, which I enjoy but which frequently puts me on a ledge. Apart from the election, another discomfort I have been suffering comes from a series of Facebook posts by an internet couple. The two are not necessarily unrelated.
The one thing about a lot of posts on Facebook, especially these days with AI, is that you really don't know if something is real or staged. There are people pranking or scaring others, getting pelted, do amazing athletic feats, magic and animal tricks, and all manner of wizardry (and, of course outright lies).
Lindy and Jlo's schtick is this cat-and-mouse routine where they attempt to catch each other by surprise. It reminds me of the old Mad Magazine "Spy versus Spy" series.
In the ones I've seen the man wins; she is bushwacked as she walks into a room, bombarded by a balloon that contains some sort of white icky liquid.
She tries to catch him at his own game but he is devilishly wiley; his traps have backups, false starts, dead ends, and fail-safes.
His pranks are productions and when he catches her off guard he chortles and delivers a final denouement, a popgun-load of confetti. Covered with bright bits of paper and the white goo, she laughs hysterically.
This has me off balance. This isn't a one-time thing. There are many of these clips. It's amazing. They're doing this in a beautiful house. Who cleans that shit up? Just how much of this is real?
Of course, the answer is that, like Trump, they've managed in a very McLuhanish way, to monetize what to the rest of us would be bad - or, at best ridiculous - behavior and, whether we like it or not, we're now part of the cast.
Cats
"Who are you?" I had told our youngest something from my youth; something uncharacteristically vicious and aggressive, a violent mean streets act I had committed. She was aghast.
It was only at that point - in the context of the present, and her response - that I was reminded of the positive changes my life has taken, the courses righted, the opportunities I've been given. The Why of the What I do.
When I came home from work today, I had that same feeling. The two recently adopted cats were snuggled up to each other on the front porch and looking cute. I took their picture.
They had been the source of much acrimony in our house. Their mama had been found having a litter under our house and the rest of the household adopted them over my Cat-5 storming. I threw my sucker in the dirt and it wasn't pretty.
I've never been an animal lover, quite the opposite actually. That comes from my New Jersey days. The animals I was used to were vectors, things to be feared or hated. That included cats and dogs and anything else. They were mean because we were mean to them in ways that now shock me to the core.
It's been a long barometric process. I eventually learned to love dogs. But cats? Cats I've hated with a passion. Besides the new cats we also had two other cats.
The first of the two showed up at my office door. I tried to chase it away but it wouldn't go. As I was leaving, I saw it hiding under a car. I tried to ignore it. "It's going to get hit by a car." "Not my problem." I made the block, stopped, and put it in my car.
I got home and the kids, who had heard my "positively no goddamn cats in this house" rule, were shocked. Somehow that was taken as permission to have cats. We soon had another.
So, today, as I came home from work, there they were. I had been shooing them away, being brusque with them, hoping that they would find another home or just go away. But these cats have known nothing but love for the last two or three months of their life. They've been sheltered and pampered and the only world they know is love.
As it should be.
Helene, Helene, Helene...
"Talk to the people that are suffering and they will tell you a different story[. T]hat is the truth. Stop believing whoever u are getting your info from. TRUMP‼️🇺🇸❤️" This culminates the nadir of responses in what passes for intelligent political discussion I was having this week - this about criticisms of the government's response to the devastating hurricane. I started to ask him how he had been in touch with the folks that have been cut off from all contact with the outside world. What had they told him about their suffering? Were they really concerned about immigration at that point? Foreign aid? Ukraine? Those were issues that one thought about from the comfort of one's home, from a position of comfort and entitlement, not in the middle of a disaster. Did they reject FEMA as some sort of Democratic Party monster? (Where are the red tarps?) Probably not. Even if they had the time to think about the things that they previously took for granted, that they might have criticized, the things that they now missed, those things were now displaced with the very basic instincts of survival: water, shelter, food, loved ones. I don't blame this joker. I just find him ironic. These low information citizens have a tendency to be arrogant and brutish. And there's a reason for that. Look at who they follow. Look at who they listen to. Telling me to stop believing whoever I'm listening to is the perfect metaphor for what is wrong. I don't for a minute think that they will quit "believing" or that they will start reading and digesting things from more than one source. Or, for that matter, that they will stop following this idiot. But if there's one important takeaway from what has happened this week, something that is actually linked to immigration, it is that in the middle of a disaster, where a real statesman would have put on hold the political posturing and bickering and worked to help ease the suffering, he exacerbated it by making false claims for purely selfish reasons. We can't deal with the army of jokers but we can take out their general. Vote this asshole out.
Owning Inflation I don't think you can discount criticisms about the current rate of inflation. You can rationalize that it's going back down, or, you can talk about it in historical context, longitudinally, etc. But the pain is real and, fair or not, the buck stops at the President's desk. We need to own what is legitimately ours, explain the why and then highlight the other factors - like price gouging - and what we propose to do about it.
I was at odds with my fellow progressives about their trashing of Joe Manchin when he balked at injecting even more money into the economy. He feared it would fuel inflation. He made sense and I said so.
It's easy for some to forget, however, that Biden inherited an economy in freefall with the prospect of a depression unlike any other. His bold measures saved this country.
You can bet your bottom dollars that no Republican would have done that. The same people that are raising hell about inflation right now are the ones that were the beneficiaries of Biden's initiatives - like extended unemployment benefits, PPP, etc. In their darkest hour, our collective darkest hour, he saved us. Like it or not.
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