tuesday
it's yes it's Tuesday yes and it's and you know what that means neighborhood sobreruedas streetmarket I go I haven't gone in two weeks to the Tuesday and I find all sorts of temptations but only buy a couple books and a pair of pants and vegetables and fruits and raisins and peanuts and beans.
All the usual characters are here stretched out under the plastic tarps and metal framework booths along both sides of M. Velazco street but something feels different I don't know what it is there is a feeling of... like some kind of hangover hanging in the air. Later I read in the newspaper that people are all short short short running short of money all hungover from the Christmas binge still and there is talk of the United States manipulating the "free" market and forcing the price of tortillas up
and up and andand as usual the politicians are sucking
at the trough gigantic salariesand the cold freezing weather is finally over but it is still winter and the children are going back to school just in timeto spend more money and meanwhile the United States is beckoning and beckoning with lots of work and money and building a big new wall the bulddozers are hard at work on one of the last sections in front of Tijuana that doesn't have a double wall well they're fixing that now yes with no-man's land between the first metal wall and the secondary huge ugly overhanging prison fence wall beyond with border patrol driving all up and down between them an go ahead make my day and night country into a 24 hour prison except we don't want to let anyone sneak in, not out this ain't the Berlin wall no it's the great wall of China is what it is oh my my my shut up Denial and we they you it is are just unjust who-said-life-is-fair a n y w a y it ain't no, it ain't so no because life.is.a.bitch.and.then.we.die meanwhile just keep on making it harder to get across without going around the end of the wall into the mountains or far far east across Arizona and everywhere dying of heat exhaustion and thirst or freezing winter in the wilderness and and andoh shut up Daniel denial you think this is bad go to Chiapas and Guatemala and watch them crawling across there to go the distance through Mexico and then get to U.S. us we our I.me.mine cogito ergo sum no No NO I don't think I FEEL therefore I am
oof get off the subject object out
T
ONIGHT IS THE presentation of Elizabeth and Franco's project of paintings of migrants who drowned in the Rio Bravo (Rio Grande) a few years back and Franco did some pictures based on that and titled some of them after the eighteen months of the Aztec calendar plus the nineteenth one of only five unlucky days (the other "months" have twenty days each) and invited Elizabeth to write some poems about them and that was two years ago now and they are looking for someone to sponsor a publication of a book and a CD and a gallery/performance tour and tonight they present it at the Casa de la 9 on ninth street right near the corner of Pio PicoSo, late in the afternoon, very late, after sunset, in fact, around five-thirty, I leave home and walk by Tere's house to see if she has come home from work, she is, but she is on the way out to the gym and cannot go and so we only kiss goodnight and I walk on along through our neighborhood, crossing from my module of composer names into the next one of painter names, yes with all the streets named after Mexican painters and there I see the little library is open and I remember Liz's husband is the librarian there and I go in and he greets me and we chat a bit as I find a book about Bernardinao de Sahagun and the books he wrote with the old Aztec wise men at the convent of Tlatelolco in the thirty, fifty years after the conquest
And then Liz comes with their son and we all sit around chatting and they have their supper and invite me to a tostada and at first I resist but they persist and so I give in and it is all very nice to be sitting there talking with this young family in the little neighborhood library except there is no water the water has been shut off for months they are tellimg me how the pipes broke last year and the water just ran out and down the street I think I remember walking past here then and wondering at all the waste running away down the street well now it's shut off and they have no water in their bathroom and a little girl runs in and has to go bad and the librarian lets her but warns her there is no water and the paper is in the cabinet next to the door.
And meanwhile I have been spending the day and the day before this yesterday and the day before yesterday wondering if I was getting writer's block or something I would only work for an hour or so and be utterly bored and not want to write any more so it is delightful just to walk along the street and see the lights on in the library and go in and read for an hour and then spend another hour chatting with this young, intelligent family yes.
Plus they gave me a tostada to eat.
And look now I have all this to write about and behold I want to write about it well so much for writer's block eh and yes
eventually I am on my way
in so many more ways than one
walking through the streets toward the launching pad, the taxi site, seat, source, for the green route taxis from Otay to downtown. Tonight I do not go across the boulevard and eat tacos at the very very popular stand over there there are always people crowded around and after weeks of coming here to the corner of Bellas Artes and Vidal y Planos to catch the green taxis downtown and to zona rio I finally went over there last week and had two tacos de cabeza and two tacos de pastor and they were pretty damn good not as excellent and unique as the chilified shrimp tacos Tere and I had day before yesterday but pretty damn good, yes
Liz and her husband and I talk about him briefly right now in the little library and then he's gone for more important things
PUFF poof no more sharkey
so anyway it's Tuesday night and I get over to the green-taxi Otay site and we roll downtown through the seven o'clock traffic past the airport already whispering in California fog that floats across the border between the land and the ocean and then down the hillside ramp toward the river valley and I gaze out the window at the moving rolling hills all covered with tiny lights of houses and shops and look over there, that one moving, an automobile headlight shining into the hazy air as it crawls down around the edge of the hill from Postal toward the river oh my there is something melancholy and delicious about riding in a car in the night takes me back
takes me back takes me back to all those trips we used to make into town to see my grandmother so many evenings it was so long ago she was the only one in the family to have a television she bought one right after the war and for years we didn't get one because the reception was so bad out in the hills and valleys where we lived in La Mesa and besides we used to always go in to see my mother's mother and we would watch T.V. there we would drive in special just for Ed Sullivan on Sunday nights or be there already for To Tell the Truth and a lot of other 1950s shows on Monday and Tuesday nights I don't remember much at first it was some of the evenings after my two years in Nursery School they called it back then but now people call it Pre-School my mother had gone back to teaching nights you see
and my father would pick me up at nursery school
it was in some social hall or something behind some church or another in North Park and my father would get me after he finished work at the convair plane factory down on Pacific Highway and we would all meet up at my grandmother's house I was so very young then only three and four and my Daddy would leave me there with grandmother to drive back down Pershing Drive to San Diego High to pick up my mother from the night school around eight or nine or something and come back and meanwhile sometimes my aunt Virg and uncle Les were there with Bobbie and Suz they were much bigger and we would all watch T.V. crowded around together in Nonnie's living room staring at that tiny flickering tube and maybe we would have a coke patent copyright bla bla bla and then uncle and aunt and cousins they would go home off the their house over in Point Loma I forget what kind of car they had before they moved out to Mount Helix and La Mesa nearby us and meanwhile as we drove home in the car to the hills of La Mesa and I would often would fall asleep except maybe wake up once or twice as we were driving home through the night up and down the canyons either out along University Avenue (where there is no university) or down Wabash to Federal Boulevard and later they built the freeway 94 and by then I was always staying awake and enjoying the view of the sliding hillsides going by oh yesor who knows sometimes I think I made all this up
it was so very very long ago before they shot the president yes
and yes and yes all that comes back tonight riding down the hill gazing out the window at the hillside lights going by in Mexico only twenty miles south and fifty-five years later yes that is one reason I like riding in a route taxi much better than driving I can just gaze out and let my mind wander no I don't have to pay attention to driving don't have to focus on the traffic or anything on no on no no oh yes I can just gaze out the window let the world go by just like I am letting these words flow out right now remembering tomorrow when I will be writing down how it was tonight how it is how it
it
you see the box now
yes
And so we come into town. Cross the river on the big boulevard bridge, rushing along with roaring traffic, turn right past the monumental feet of Cuauhtemoc feathered Aztec warrior statue where flag wavers celebrate football and election victories for Mexico in front of the most gigantic supermarket ever seen on Earth.
Struggle down the super-tree-planted paseo through the crowded river zone traffic in front of the big shopping mall and movie plex, then bend around that giant pair of scissors blades stabbing up into the sky and hurry on past the Mercado Hidalgo, down Sanchez Taboada past the new CostCo superbox turn left onto Fifth and wander through the shuttered evening produce district past the open-at-night flower shops into downtown into the old downtown.Into the grungy old downtown ah yes. Past the vegetable and fruit warehouses and outlet shops, up through the evening traffic crawling into the center of the heart of the centro, taxis pulling over at every corner to let passengers drop down, busses and trucks growling and complaining, cars honking, everyone trying to get somewhere
go somewhere do
something yes.Get out at Madero and walk one block up to the corner of 6th, then halfway up the sidewalk to the flickering neon cantina door: Dandy del Sur.
Ah, look, there he is: once again we have the pleasure of seeing David, and drinking a couple beers before you go off six blocks walking to la Casa de la 9. But only a couple beers as we want to go see Elizabeth and Franco show their work.Only a couple delicious micheladas dos EQUIS laughing and monkey jabbering with David before leavingto go zig-zagging those six blocks,
7th, Negrete, 8th, Ocampo, 9th, Pio Pico and look: there it is: the old house that has been converted into one of the hottest performance and art sites in town, the Casa de la 9.We're late but so is the show. It starts after we get there. The poetry and performance by Elizabeth, is, as usual, something quite extraordinary, BUT we are so prejudiced we enjoy nothing so much as just sitting and listening, and tonight there is more: pendant upon the words hanging in the air are Franco's paintings, projected via powerpoint on the screen (how weird, we were just jabbering with David about powerpoint back in the Dandy del Sur oh my what a small, small world yes what...)
After the poetry comes belly dancing. Then you walk back downtown again and catch a midnight green taxi home to Otay.
Sleep.
Amen. Goodbye.
or well... goodbye for now at least
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