Dunes

I can feel sand in my hair. It’s in my hair and my hands between my fingers, in every pocket of my pants and jacket and in my shoes. The grains crunch beneath my feet, between my teeth and against the metal links of my wristwatch. I can hear the sand constantly, regardless of how much fills my ears. The earth is covered in it, my bed is made of it, my food is seasoned with it, and its presence is inescapable even in the darkness of starlight. My dreams are of cornmeal dunes painted with windswept strokes of spilt wine, looming in the lazy pomegranate glow of another faded day. And when I wake up, I see these images in front of me and I wonder. I sit and I wonder with sand in my hair.

The Old Man and the Sea

The only thing I know for certain about Pangasio Valverde is that his name is not Pangasio Valverde. He’s an older man, probably sixty, and worn beyond his years. The dark creases in his leather skin reflect a life full of emotion. He has deep-set ashen eyes like storm clouds, though there’s nothing particularly gloomy about the man. He has a thick, black licorice mustache that he waxes meticulously. It shines against the backdrop of his weathered face like a brand new bumper on a junk car. A brick-red flannel shirt clings loosely to his thin, muscular frame. He looks like he might have been a fisherman but he’s never made mention of his vocation and I’ve never asked. Perhaps it’s the name. He tells me to call him Panga, which means a type of fish. I don’t know if the fish is any good but I like the name. Or perhaps it’s the frayed knot of salt and pepper hair that curls and slumps off his head.

We play cards together every week. He sits on a crate beside his beachfront cabaña and pours sugarcane alcohol into two glasses on top of the table between us. All I can smell is the booze. The sweet and harsh aroma triggers a waterfall of saliva. The stuff could take the paint off your car and the lining off your liver. Panga doesn’t own a car and, as I look down at the crate of empty bottles below him, I doubt whether he owns a liver either. Out of courtesy and against my better judgment I always drink with him. He usually beats me and I usually take a few steps sideways when I rise from the table. Whenever I look up from my cards to try to read what he’s thinking, I can’t help but stare at his hands. They are enormous. His fingers curve upward like the roots of some ancient tree. His cards are tiny shreds of paper between his fingertips, which he bunches uncomfortably close together in order to hold on. He’s not a very large man, and age has dried him out even more, but his hands look as though they could each strangle someone at the same time. I wonder if they ever have. He lets out a long, wheezing cough and it’s the unconscious cue for his hands to lay the cards down and steal an unfiltered cigarette out of his shirt pocket. He holds it up between three fingertips like a toothpick and twists it back and forth in a brief moment of peculiar and studied admiration. He takes a deep breath in between his cracked lips and exhales a stream of smoke the color of his eyes. I watch and wonder who this man is and why I’m sitting with him loosing a card game.

Two young girls walk by. His gaze is inimitably fixed. Such concentration is hard to believe. Our games are routinely interrupted by the passing of women. Their age and physical appearance are irrelevant. Often he will look behind himself without warning, as if he can smell them coming. The girls are out of sight before he turns back around. He looks at me in a surprisingly relaxed manner and begins to speak very casually in Spanish, but the intensity is still frozen in his eyes. He says that when he was younger, the girls could never resist such a gaze. They would forget where they were going and stop to talk to him. They could not stop talking to him until he looked away. They were caught in the spotlight of his stare, he says, and when they were about to fall swooning into his arms he would release them. He says they were all beautiful, and when they walked away they were as wet as the ocean. I think he must have been a fisherman.

A Pineapple Salamander

All my life I’ve had a peculiar habit of holding on to things of little or no value for a long time. I keep them in boxes, clusters in my sock drawer and piles on the floor of my closet. I hid them in the woods as a kid, or up in a tucked away corner of the attic or a wayward dresser in the basement. Some people call this being a packrat. I like to think of it as an unusually sentimental sensibility. For me, these baubles and kink-knacks represent pieces of time, places in history that are inimitable and unknown to other people. And often throughout the course of my life, these small but significant items have gone on long, curious journeys with me and ended up in places they would never have expected to find themselves. Take for instance a bottle cap from a beach parking lot in Massachusetts. It hung around for ten years and eventually found its way to the bottom of a stream in Northern California. Or a pebble from the side of a road in Florida that now sits on the side of a lake in Maine. For some odd reason, I revel in helping these objects travel great, unnecessary distances. I’ve taken a rock from a mountaintop in British Columbia and placed it unassumingly under a park bench in Costa Rica. No one who walks past and notices the rock can ever possibly know where it came from, but there it is. I had a phone number from a girl in California scribbled on a ripped pack of matches with a website address where she sells her artwork. For two years I never once looked at the art. Then one day, it occurred to me to look. The number now rests peacefully and half buried in the dirt of a potted plant in a Buenos Aires apartment stairwell. Why? Because it means something. It was a symbolic gesture that, until writing about it now, was a secret, a secret of absolutely no importance to anyone else but me. It represents a part of my life, a journey I’ve taken, and in a weird way it opens fresh perspective on the possibilities of the world. Somehow it’s like watching geological time-lapsed photography, comprehending firsthand the way boulders become sand or tectonic plates shift the continents. It’s understanding my small part in something so much greater than myself. Some people go to church, some meditate, some pray. I collect shit and leave it around the world.

My favorite story is how a dried up salamander from 20 years ago made its way down to Panama. During the hectic preflight hours on the day of my departure for CR, I stumbled upon an old shoebox while rummaging to find a bathing suit in my closet. The box contained Polaroid pictures, tacks, string, an owl pellet and some ancient elementary school love notes. In among the nest of debris lay a tiny, flattened salamander, his tail curled around, feet stuck out, and hardened into a reddish-brown fossil. He had no doubt been peeled from the sun-burnt asphalt on a late spring day in Massachusetts. Now he lived among digested shrew skeletons and misspelled poems with little hearts dotting the ‘i’s. He looked like he needed a vacation. I popped the salamander in the small front pocket of my backpack.

I was in Costa Rica for 2 ½ months before travelling to Panama. The bus ride was long, the air was hot and wet, and I was tired. We’d stopped only once, and by the time we reached our final destination, I was in desperate need a walk to stretch my legs and my thoughts. I wandered off to examine the sights and found a quiet path down to the ocean, sparsely lined with battered shacks of bright Crayola colors. Towards the end of the road was a yard, maintained in appearance but at the moment unattended. To the right, where the road ended, was a thick tuft of bushes. I snuck behind a bush and treated myself to some much needed relief. Standing there, breathing easy and looking out between the palms at gorgeous Caribbean, I felt a sharp pain on the side of my leg. Beside me was a lone pineapple plant with a single pineapple spiking up from the center. It sat there poised like a rocket ship preparing for launch. I couldn’t resist the temptation of having fresh fruit waiting for me in my hotel room the next morning, so I unzipped my backpack and carefully (cause they’re sharp buggers) plucked the fruit from its home. As I zipped the bag back up again, I noticed the blank stem were the pineapple had been rooted moments earlier. For no particular reason whatsoever, I fished out the tiny salamander from the front of my pack and placed him gently in the center of the barren plant. I smiled, picked up the pack and walked back to meet our group. I don’t know what became of the salamander, but I always like to think that he stayed there a while and became absorbed by the next fruit that grew, stuck inside a pineapple in Panama. An interesting afterlife and, at the risk of being corny, a rather sweet ending if you ask me.

On the process of becoming nocturnal

The other night I left work at 4:30 in the morning. Walking out the door, someone asked me, “What are you doing? You wanna get some food or play cards or something?” As strange as this may sound, I actually considered the question before settling on, “No thanks, I think I’m gonna try to get some sleep.” This is a Wednesday night in Buenos Aires. I headed down the street to catch the bus and saw two kids skipping along like it was Saturday afternoon. They were 10 or 11 years old, well dressed, and by themselves, although obviously they belonged to someone. I hopped onto the bus and found a seat open in the very back… all the rest were occupied. My eyes scanned the seated rows, searching for the collection of usual suspects. Where were all the junkies, prostitutes and frightened college students? Instead I found teenage couples kissing, middle-aged people in street clothes and mothers with small children still awake. Barreling down the avenues of BA, still dotted with traffic, we passed outdoor cafés alive with friendly chatter. City workers collected trash, delivered papers and swept out gutters. Street vendors set up shop and local business owners hosed down storefront sidewalks. The light began pushing against the nighttime backdrop, not yet visible but somehow making its presence known. It’s during those brackish hours of morning when two worlds collide and a special part of the city’s personality becomes noticeable. As I exited the bus and walked towards my apartment, I crossed paths with a nun who brushed swiftly past in a strong, determined stride. She was dressed head to toe in white and I in my black shirt and jeans. While I had been drinking beer after work she had no doubt been offering her morning prayers. The juxtaposition clicked in my head and I stopped and turned to notice her. I couldn’t wrap my mind around a life so very different from my own; yet there we were, walking across the same sidewalk, each moving in our own direction but together at the same time. With thoughts of the Twilight Zone ringing between my ears, I went home and went to bed. I think it was 5:15. They say New York is the city that never sleeps. I disagree with that. New York is ‘a’ city that never sleeps.

Home Sweet Home

My apartment in Once (pronounced ‘on-say’) is on the eighth floor of our building, overlooking a busy street corner. The intersection is a swarming mass of warm bodies, hot engines and beating sunshine. The light glows soft and bright off the sides of the tall edifices, painting them in grayish-white and gentle highlights of peach and rose. The cacophony of noise rises up through the large, glass doors that swing open into our living room and expose the city. Looking over the railing, I’m reminded of the inner-workings of an anthill, or at least what I imagined them to be as a child. A stairwell entrance to the subway burrows down beneath the street on every corner of the crossing. The roads are a constant construction zone, littered with orange pylons, rickety chicken-wire fencing and concrete barriers. Dust takes on a life of its own, dancing in eddies amidst torrents of bus traffic and the wind of towering buildings. Inevitably it finds its way into our apartment and settles as a film across the floor. Regardless of how recently the maid has cleaned, the result is a perpetual blackness on the bottoms of our feet, as though we were walking over the asphalt itself. To the immediate right of the downstairs entrance is a kiosk with a soft serve ice cream vendor in front. The woman selling ice cream lets out a high-pitched call, a constant, rhythmic siren reminding the passers-by of her presence. “Hay Heladoooooos!” Close your eyes and picture Alvin the Chipmunk with a head cold. The sound can be heard from blocks away, from inside the building as I wait for the elevator, and even through the hustle and bustle that enters my eighth floor windows. Sometimes, walking home from the grocery store, I get lost in the flow of the streets and venture a block past my front door. But then a voice calls out, like a beacon, steering me to safety. “Hayy Heladoooooos!” It’s simply a part of the neighborhood. Like the construction. I always laugh when I walk past signs that say, “Men at Work.” It’s the irony of vacant job sites, or the more amusing collection of bodies sitting, loitering, kicking up their heels. “Men at Lunch” would be a more accurate symbol. When there is work in progress, it’s elementary at best. The site at the corner is an attempt to put in new electrical lines for the subway. Currently, they’re excavating the site with a bucket tied to the end of a rope. I think they’re on schedule to finish with the Big Dig. I’ll have more on the neighborhood in future postings.

I wish blogging had a better name, but I'm doing it anyway

Ahhh. The first post on my first blog. Hopefully a return to the wonderful habit of writing on a daily basis. To friends and family who've commented on my writing via email, I thank you for the kind criticisms. Please continue with such as I make posts on this website. The focus of this page will be my time spent in Argentina and the stories, observations, etc. with which it is filled. Hopefully, the nuances contained in each posting will collectively convey a real sense of daily Argentine life. So to begin with, I got a haircut today. Now usually this is not a big deal (unless you're a woman, in which case I probably didn't notice anyway) but in BsAs it's a frightening experience. Why? Because they love mullets. I mean Love, with a capital L. Also, Mohawks. Therefore, no matter what you tell the barber, he's going to try to leave as much hair as he possibly can on the back of your head without you noticing. He will also cut the sides of your head short, probably with a trimmer, and inevitably take too much off the front. The final aesthetic? Male pattern baldness meets Joe Dirt. I know because I saw my family on Christmas morning (via webcam) and their first comments were in regards to having never noticed my receding hairline before. Thanks guys. But they Love it here. Mullets, Mohawks, Micheal Jackson, Madonna... for a modern city it's awfully eighties. If you enjoy dressing up as Pat Benatar for Halloween than you would enjoy Buenos Aires. Now I have to go to work, where we will be listening to plenty of AC/DC and Guns n Roses. And, even though it's 90 degrees outside, I'll probably wear a hat.