My sweet fifteen.

19, Octubre 2008

I stand bare-chested in a 2^nd-floor salon approximately the size of a dentist’s waiting room, with a shiny tile floor of the floral persuasion and walls painted a soothing 1970’s Refrigerator Green (as is the rest of my house… must have been a sale on green). The solitary floor fan valiantly chugs along from its tenuous perch on the windowsill, pumping in marginally cooler outside air. Mauricio has the wide-eyed panicky look of somebody who should have spent the last two weeks learning his parts instead of sleeping or banging his very attractive girlfriend (I posit the later). He brandishes his bass guitar like one about to whack-a-mole at the carnival and makes frantic eye contact with the drummer. As we hit the entrance he yells, in English, “Well seence mai baybee left mee! (“bum bum”).

We are six men. We are the cover band for a professional Elvis impersonator from England, due to arrive next week for the grand opening of a new bar in town. That is, due to arrive next week if he doesn’t get waylaid in Chicago due to a known typo on his boarding pass (you can’t take these things back once they go through the system, apparently). So far, we can play about half of the nearly thirty songs in the set… poorly. The first show is this Thursday. We are, of course, fucked. This is my life.

Lately, I’ve been feeling like I am living the sequel to a book. I guess you could say I’m back for Hogwarts Year Two. Mérida is largely the same. Got some new buses, new cafes, a new governor (i.e. radical change in government). I still interact with many of the same people from when I studied abroad here, my roommate Juan the bassist, for example, but the contexts are often wildly different. Many of the same kids I played with in the orchestra last year attend the music school, where I sit in on a jazz workshop on Mondays.

“Holy shit, I never expected to see you again.”

“Yeah, me neither. How’s it going?”

“Tranquilo, tranquilo. What are you doing here?”

“Um, playing the trombone.”

Actually, that’s really the most complete explanation I can give for my presence here, and, nearly a month later, it continues to be so. Not four days after my arrival, I played two tokadas with Rikita (google: Rikita Banana). The first was a sweaty mess of punk rockeros in the union hall of henequeneros (i.e. producers and manufacturers of fine products made from the fiber of the henequen, or sissal, plant). The second was for a quinceañera.

From a documentary I watched in sixth grade about the topic, I could tell you that a quinceañera involves a Mexican girl’s rite of passage to adulthood on her 15^th birthday and, if memory serves, a piñata. Apparently, if you are rich and live in 2008, you buy your little princess a punk band instead of a candy-filled donkey. This was a pretty extravagant affair, with some 50-60 kiddy guests and their parental units, a four-course dinner and what I can only describe as synchronized male dancer DJ’s. For our set, the birthday girl planted herself two feet in front of the stage the entire time and sang every word from memory. Without question, she knew way more lyrics to our songs than I do. Either that, or she fakes it better than I do. When I’m not playing, I usually just pretend to lip-synch and dance like an angry monkey covered in fire ants. It works. We did our thing, ate their food, drank their beer, got paid and went home happy. The most ridiculous part of these shows is afterwards, which is typically a time reserved for flagrant narcissism: signing autographs (i.e. CD’s, backpacks, babies, etc.) and taking photos with cell phone cameras (i.e. flashing gang signs, piling on top of each other, etc.).

Rikita continues to chambear around Mérida and outskirts. A couple days ago, we played in Chochola (Try not to think about Count Chocula, I dare you), a little pueblo of a few thousand inhabitants about an hour outside of town. I believe this concert was intended to be a sort of outreach deal by the Ministry of Culture to bring “City Music” to the campo. An air-conditioned (!!!) van delivered us to the main plaza, where workers were setting up the stage. About an hour before the show, somebody set off a few bottle rockets from the clock tower, which I am told means “get yourself to the plaza, shit’s about to go down.”

We shared the stage with Sñlo (pronounced “sinyuelo”) a rock-en-español group from outside of Buenos Aires, on tour through Central America. They were good people, good musicians, and to my ear, completely incomprehensible due to their thick Argentine accents. Their drummer is the spitting image of Dave Honig. After the show, the good folks of Chochola wined and dined us with flautas (chicken-filled tortillas with manchego cheese on top), papas (‘taters), and ice-cold Pepsi (wha-wha-whaaat?!? Not Coca?!?) while the patriarch engaged our grandiloquent lead singer in an interminable conversation about agriculture, the campo, and the sprawling wave of gang violence that seems to be eating up Mexico.

Note: As I type this, a tumble-hair rolls past. If you have tile floors and are a mammal, I have learned that you must mop every so often. Otherwise, little (or sometimes big) balls of hair accumulate and roll to and fro with the breeze. This is doubly true if you are doubly hairy.

On the van-ride back to Mérida, I chatted with one of the Argentines about how ungodly hot it is in Mexico while we waited for a good forty minutes in line at a reten, a highway police barricade. Retenes are the government’s response to narco violence. You slow to a near stop while soldiers with bulletproof jackets and semi-automatic weaponry shine bright lights in your face. If you don’t appear to be drug traffickers or to be carrying unreasonable amounts of heroine or cocaine, you get to drive through. It’s not exactly a comprehensive search, but from what I read in the papers, the narcotraficantes are not fans. Shortly before I arrived in Mérida, there had been an incident where 12 headless bodies were discovered outside of town. I believe all the victims were reported to have been drug dealers/wholesalers or otherwise connected to the trade. The perpetrators were supposedly members of a rival cartel. So the participants weren’t exactly random. Even so, this was the most grisly incident in years, and people are grudgingly beginning to admit that Mérida is not the tranquil haven it has been in the past. Compared to Mexico City, though, Mérida is Candyland. I keep my head down, don’t smoke the crack, and do all right.

Hasta la proxima,

Ben

The idiot grant.

9.9.08

Amigos,

For those of you who occasionally use an apostrophe and a two-digit number less than or equal to eight after your name, I’ll bet you have recently found yourself, perhaps for the first time, gainfully employed, enlisted, enrolled or an otherwise spoken for and responsible member of society.

Righteous.

After several admittedly half-assed attempts to secure some kind of institutional monetary approbation, I found myself at May’s end with nothing more than a diploma and two firm resolutions:

(1) Applying to grad school at this moment just might give me an aneurysm, not to mention actually being a grad student; and
(2) Fuck Watson, Fulbright and Osgood;  I’m going to go play the trombone in Mexico if that’s my dream, while I can still grow hair on my chest and drink 40’s on a mountaintop, buttocks flapping boldly in the wind.

After graduation, I moved back into my parents’ house in Beaverton and spent over a month trying to get a job, gainful or otherwise.  After brief stints as a janitor in an elementary school, muscling half-ton display cases at Macy’s with a man-child named Patrick and getting fired from the Verizon tent at the Portland Pride Festival, I stumbled into an undeservedly amazing job as a Spanish interpreter for the local county circuit court.  Working at the courthouse for just nigh over two months, I have scrounged together enough capital to fund my own personal idiot grant, with a bit leftover for later.

I am pleased to present yours truly as the very first recipient of the Disappoint Your Parents Fellowship, which sends young women and men (just men, so far) of promise on high-risk, low-profit, vision quests to needlessly hazardous corners of the earth.  I leave Sunday after next for Mérida, Yucatán (Mexico), where I will rejoin a punk-ska band and explore myself and continent.  All this, hopefully, without starving or impregnating anybody and (keep those eyes unrolled, now) trying to make some sort of positive local impact, taking a microscopic amount of polish to the most-powerful-nation-on-earth’s regrettably besmirched reputation.

I’ll take a brief pause here to mention that if you’re getting this message, it means that you are now a lifetime member of my “travel abroad email list.”  I did this once before and people seemed to tolerate it pretty well.  So if you want off the list now, then you are shit out of luck.  To make that happen, you’d have to do something crazy and questionably legal; like send me an email to that effect or something.

I won’t have any real news yet for at least another two weeks, but I thought I’d describe a little about my work at the courthouse.  Basically, I am a Spanish interpreter for people representing themselves (i.e. without a lawyer) in family law cases, the two most abundant of which would be divorces and child custodies.  My other unofficial title is “Triage,” which I think is pretty sweet and sounds like I am taking bloodlettings or setting broken pelvises, but really just means I roam around the waiting room and help people where I can (inevitably pissing off people who mistakenly believe that I operate by some turn-based system).  According to my paycheck, my real official title is “Temp” or some weak sauce like that.

All this should be pretty amusing to any native speakers reading this, but I make no apologies: Despite needing to be constantly working on my conversational skills, interpreting is easily the most interesting and satisfying job I’ve had in a long time.  For English speakers, I interpret legalese.  Despite exactly zero background in legal stuff, this is actually no great feat.  After two or three weeks, anyone with some patience could do this job once they’ve seen the forms a few times.  For Spanish speakers, it is a double translation as (almost) none of our documents are available in anything but English.

Our service is a free one.  Kind of like after-school help, we direct people to the papers they need and when necessary, (about 98% of the time) help them fill them out properly.  I’ll even work with people on editing the “essay” portions of their cases, which I’m told is kind of like teaching.  It goes without saying that this office is often the last and/or only recourse for people stuck in abusive, neglectful or otherwise ill-fated relationships.  We give assistance to domestic violence and rape victims, meth addicts, teen parents, strippers, the homeless, ex-felons, the unemployed, the uninitiated, the abandoned and people who just flat out made a lot of really bad choices.  Whatever your opinion is of the astonishingly high divorce rates in this part of the world, I am now a firm believer that for most of the people we see, a separation is absolutely what they need to get back on their feet and their lives back on track.  And everything is more complicated when kids are involved.

And then there are the crazies.  Working in Family Law is like simultaneously following about a hundred soap operas of varying sizes, day in and out.  Some wink in and out of existence in a day or less.  But some masochists just keep coming back for more; I guess they like paperwork.  We worked with Randy for weeks on his divorce before his wife came in one day to file some paper or other.  On the outside, I’m like “blah blah blah you’ll want to file the extension on the TPS report and”… But inside, I’m like Holy shit! It’s Randy’s other half!  She seems awfully lucid to have been married to that guy.  Sex must’ve been pretty good. But seriously… Randy is a meth-addict.  He has uncomfortably visible open scabs all over his hands and face and when he comes in to work on his case, he spreads about 800 papers all over the (only) table.  When he talks to you (he talks to everybody), he tells you in his jittery way about his mentally retarded son in jail, his cheatin’ wife (“She used to be such a good Christian! Went to Church and everything! Don’t know what happened…”) and how somebody ripped off his car.  One day, he came in wearing his glasses with both nosepads completely to one side of his nose.  Take a moment to imagine how that looks.  A few times a week, we’ll check in on Randy via the online judicial network.  Yep, Randy got picked up this morning for a hit and run.  Gonna be a quiet day…

Alright folks, that’s it for now.  Please bring me news of your lives.  I know some phone dates will be in order for the next couple of weeks.

love,

Ben

A contentious corner

B. Portland Mercury

Sarah interviewed some folks and wrote a story about day labor in Portland.   I helped with translations.

Prologo

A. Chiquitos School

It’s late June and if you’re lucky enough to be 8 and enrolled in an expensive private immersion school, school is most decidedly not out for you.  In response to a craigslist ad, I spent three days doing janitorial-type tasks for headmistress Isabel, most of which could be categorized either as fighting entropy or lifting heavy things.  The first task was to make the “music room,” a small classroom filled with books and aluminum piping, into a usable classroom.  I moved about 500 lbs of stock paper out of there, futilely tried to tune all their toy guitars and “set up” (read: plugged in the ethernet cables on) a few PC’s.

Over the course of my stint at Chiquitos, I also powerwashed about the entire usable exterior of the building, a past apartment complex, mowed 80% of the waist-high grass lawn (before the gas ran out on the mower) and climbed up on the tool shed to clean Grey Recluse webs out of the rafters.  Pros: Tax-free, under-the-table, minimum wage. Cons: They ran out of stuff for me to do after three days, putting me back on the job market.

Also, I found myself stuck in the middle of some interestingly awkward tension between Headmistress Isabel and ex-husband Romin, Chiquitos’ tech guy/plumber.  Their 8-year-old daughter is an an enrolled student.  Romin, a native Iranian, speaks exactly zero Spanish, presumably to spite his ex-wife and co-workers.  Most of my interactions with him consisted of delivering messages from Isabel and sneaking undetected into his “den” to unload antiquated, unusable computer parts.  At one point, Isabel sent me to borrow a screwdriver to put together the table I was supposed to assemble:

Me: Do you have a phillips head I could borrow? Isabel asked me to put together one of those tables.
Romin: She asked you to do that?  You do not do that.  That is my job.

Whoah, dude.  I am not a threat to your weird little distopia here.  I just powerwash.  All in all, not a bad gig: The kids were cute and I got to practice my spanish with the faculty, all of whom hailed from various spanish-speaking countries.  It turned out to be Isabel who brought up the apparently comic inversion of the white kid doing grounds work for the Hondurans.  Ok.

I did send them a resume and cover letter for a vacant music teacher position, but I never heard back from them.  On to greener pastures…

I can haz blag?

I did a little traveling last year and I sent out this email list thing to my friends back home.  Now, when I bump into people I haven’t talked to in a while, they typically mention the emails.  So I gather that they liked them; or, failing that, disliked them but read them anyways.  Or maybe they just harbor fond memories of deleting them, unread, from their inboxes.  In any case, I have since then obtained a College degree and, for the first time in seventeen years, find myself under no legally or socially binding expectation to go to school next fall.

So I’m going to mexico.  To play the trombone.  I can feel my parents squirming right about now.

The rough futureplan is this:

1. Graduate (check).
2. Work this summer at anything, make bank (in progress).
3. Go to Mexico. Play the trombone for a couple years.  Don’t starve.
4. Come to my senses, come home and apply to grad school.  Be a microbiologist.  Don’t starve.

I’m starting to feel this blag thing.  I used to be of the opinion that if you didn’t slave over the HTML, then it wasn’t a webpage.  I’m sort of coming around to the idea that obstinately doing things the hard way, something I once did out of genuine curiosity for technology, but, more recently, do out of pure spite, is not a good use of my time.  I could be living, for example.  I also used to think blogs were for just for self-important teenagers and artistes, but irony prevents me from maintaining this belief.  I wasn’t really sold on blogs until I read Yoani Sanchez’ stuff, but now I’m on board.  Sanchez blogs, at great physical risk to her person, from Cuba on a computer she scrapped together from blackmarket parts; and taught herself HTML on top of that. I guess that’s pretty good.

So here it is, a blag about Mexico.  I guess what you just read is called an “Author’s Foreward,” to those in the biz.  After that comes the prologue.