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Mendoza, Argentina.
Sunday in the park. Stretched out on an expanse of wide empty lawn. The little boy selling empanadas could not have picked a better time to approach me. Twenty five pesos for an empanada? That’s kind of a lot… Of course, hunger won out over thrift :) The boy opened up his wicker picnic basket, pulled out a small plastic platter and dropped a steaming empanada into it. Followed by another… and another… and another. After 10 I stopped counting. There was literally a pile of handmade empanadas in front of me, each one comprised of layers of flaky pastry stuffed with salty, savory ground beef and onions. All for the equivalent of a few dollars.
Sun shining down, families scattered about enjoying a tranquil afternoon, a stack of delicious empanadas in front of me…. Truly the best kind of Sunday.
Posted February 19, 2013 at 8:55pm
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Warm January sun setting, parade stepping off on Tchoupitoulas Street, while the crowds fill up Saint Charles with ladders and chairs. I drive on towards Frenchman Street with the windows down, feeling like the luckiest person in the world.
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A morning walk through Audubon Park with Tim and Stacey. The Mississippi just out of sight. Spanish moss dripping from the trees. Tim stalks the geese and Stacey and I stand back, out of pecking range. We pass along the back of the the zoo, can see the giraffes through the holes in the fence munching on leaves, their black tongues snapping. It’s fall, or winter maybe. I’m not sure. It doesn’t matter. The weather is warm and the sun is out. We don’t walk, we stroll. We gape at the huge houses that edge the park, the ones with columns and stained glass windows and wraparound porches. It’s mid-week. The walking paths are mostly quiet, save for the occasional mom with a stroller or an unsteady toddler. Stacey points out plants whose names get mangled on my tongue. She plucks a handful of leaves off a stalk and sticks it under my nose. I inhale. It’s scent is cool; sharp. It’s mint. I breathe in again; one of those deep breaths that goes all the way down to your toes. I exhale. Happiness, NOLA-style.
Labor Day
Note: I’m breaking habit and posting something a little different tonight. In a way it’s more personal than my typical entry because i actually spent a few hours working on it, and I hesitated to post it for that reason. I guess it would fall under the category of “creative” writing, but in truth, it’s just a little bit of a snapshot of my summer, with some creative liberties thrown in. Despite what it says below, I’m actually really, truly, happy in New Orleans. And I’m sleeping just fine. :)
It was a rooftop summer, endlessly hot and cloyingly sticky. At night, every building top in Bushwick was dotted with its residents, crawling up from their toe jam apartments, squinting under slices of moonlight and lengths of Christmas lights, stretching their legs at last.
Mikey stowed a two by four on his roof ledge, which he brandished whenever a roach scuttled by, (there were lots) sending down furiously on the praline shell of every critter that darted within arms reach. He wasn’t typically prone to violence, which was probably why he enjoyed it so much.
We were lucky – we had a private rooftop; the only entrance was through a door in Collin’s bedroom. The roof was stuffed with warped wood furniture, and the yellow stalks of a half dozen dead tomato vines (a failed experiment that Mikey still couldn’t bear to dispose of) and a rusty barbeque grill, and stacks of terracotta pots which were meant to one day house plants except that, as of yet, none had ever survived long enough to merit repotting. Most nights it was just me and Mikey, splitting a six-pack and talking bullshit over the street sounds of Montrose Ave below.
I had flown up from New Orleans to finish out the end of this swollen, interminably fucked up season with my brothers nearby. It was admitting failure, certainly, but I was too ragged to care about my pride any longer.
It had been a summer where I wasn’t really anywhere and never really found my anchor. I spent June and July in New York, sleeping on hammocks and couches and floors, waiting for news from Joan. At last, she called to say that there was a house available, a tiny shotgun, on General Pershing Street. And so, I moved to New Orleans, which had been the plan all along. The movers dumped my stuff there on a Tuesday afternoon, leaving me to assemble my bed from the pile of lumber that had been sitting in a Queens storage unit since December. It was a bed I bought seven years ago, when Kevin and I were shopping for rentals in New York and were flushed with love and hope and the promise of things getting better. The two of us had assembled that bed in my old apartment in Queens, and then collapsed onto it, because that is the best way to celebrate assembling any kind of bed. Kevin died that following January, and then the bed became just mine and seemed so, so big and it’s presence made me happy and sad and sometimes I crawled into it and didn’t leave for days.
In New Orleans, I put the bed together myself, all the pieces fitting as they should but two brackets had disappeared in the move and though I dumped out every Ziploc bag of screws and nails and latches and clips I had brought with me from Queens, the brackets were gone, gone, gone. I propped the frame up instead with stacks of my thickest books – Marquez and Dostoevsky and Rushdie finally after all these years of neglect were put to some use.
Every day, the Louisiana heat would unroll like one of those thick Oriental rugs that you can just sink into with only one step and get lost in for hours. The mosquitoes were waiting to pounce so I stayed indoors and smoked the Pall Malls I’d brought back from Peru and swept my long sloping linoleum kitchen floor in some kind of manic fit at 2am, when the heat still hadn’t subsided and it was too hot to sleep and there was nothing to do but pace and smoke and press ice cubes to my shoulders and wait for the sweet shock of cold to dribble its way down my spine. I reread all my favorite books, skipping to the best passages and savoring the way the words all fit together like smooth, expensive tongue and groove flooring. I read The Bell Jar and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and Catch-22 and all the fantastic novels of my childhood, stuffed with delicious words like lugubrious and characters with names like Chief White Halfoat and Big Slim Hazard.
The freight trains traveled on a track that ran parallel to Tchoupoutoulas Street, shadowing the Mississippi River, three blocks from my house. Eventually they would continue towards Texas, dragging cars bloated with freshly refined sugar from the Domino factory upriver and the occasional gutter punk escaping the coastal south. The early train would pass at 5:30 AM, as the sun branded it’s track marks into the sky, when the house finally felt cool and I had crawled into bed at last. Some mornings the click-clack was enough to soothe me into an anxious sleep, twisted around my orange bed sheet, my legs stiff like a dying insect. But eventually, the train was not enough, the bed was not enough, or the Pall Malls or the sloped linoleum floor. On the hottest day in August, I flew back to New York, where rooftops offered relief and I knew that I could collapse onto my brother’s hammock and feel it’s sides wrap around me like a safety net.
On Labor Day weekend, from every corner of Bushwick, the celebrations echoed off the inky purple sky: the stereo speakers someone had mounted in their window, the tangle of Spanish from the Puerto Ricans on the roof across the street, the shouts from the hipster parties that spilled out in the direction of Williamsburg, three generations of the Lopez family stretched out on folding lawn chairs on the sidewalk below. We piled chicken breasts and sloppily constructed hamburgers onto the grill and tipped back beers, as the salty cooking smells rose into the air. I raised my face towards the stars and watched the moon shiver so slightly and, for a moment, didn’t know if I was in Bushwick, or New Orleans or even Peru, or maybe some other far off place I’d yet to find that someday I might be able to call home.
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Good morning sunshine! Taken looking out onto the runway at Louis Armstrong Airport.
Heading back to NYC for the worlds most ridiculous work commute.
Posted August 21, 2012 at 8:02am
Got home last night so late, it was early. The sky was brightening; my Sunday Times had already been deposited on my front porch.
My new life in New Orleans has been unfolding for a month now: a tiny shotgun house with a porch swing in the front and a hammock in the back, just like I’ve always dreamed about. Three little rooms, each with a fireplace and huge, yawning windows and tall tall ceilings. I can walk to the grocery store, to Tipitina’s, to the cute little french bakery on Magazine Street to buy the most delicious chocolate croissants in possibly the world. It’s hard to believe that this is really my life now, because I’ve wanted it to be this way for so long.
I keep wondering what I’ve ever done so right in my life to deserve this.
New Orleans in the summer is endlessly hot, endlessly humid. The rain comes every day in these epic, unannounced storms that dump down from the sky without warning and flood parts of Tchoupitoulas Street in a matter of minutes. They pass just as quickly, and life continues on in it’s slow, unaffected pace. The weather reminds me of the climate on the coast of Ecuador — the mosquitos, the heat, the storms.
I’m alone. The number of “full time” friends I have in this city I can count on one hand, with plenty of fingers left over. That’s ok, for the most part. I’ve always liked being alone. Still, I’m taking every invitation that comes my way — drinks, dinner, anything. It’s starting from scratch, looking for new friends at every turn.
The first few weeks, it felt like i was crashing in on someone else’s life. Even as I shopped for furniture, unpacked boxes, picked out paint colors, the whole situation seemed like some sort of domestic vacation. My friend Stacey is a 16 minute walk from my house. The grocery store I shopped at whenever I’d visited her in the past is now “my” grocery store. In years past, I’d walk up and down Magazine St and imagine a scenario where I could somehow live here, somehow enjoy all of this as a resident, not a tourist. Now that I am, it’s just unreal.
I started vending at an art market downtown. It’s a night market, which means it starts at 7 and doesn’t close until 1 or 2am. I arrived on the first night, weighed down with my tables and suitcases full of jewelry and set up under strings of white criss-crossing Christmas lights. It took only minutes before I was meeting other artists and splitting a six pack of Abita with the girl who had the booth across from me. Soon, the customers were filtering in, and I found myself falling right into the same routine I’ve sleepwalked through a thousand times before: some chit-chat, a sale here and there, a swig from my beer bottle.
By 2am, my car was packed up and I drove home through the quiet side of the French Quarter, down Decatur Street, through the warehouse district and along Magazine Street.
By the second week at the Market, I felt myself settling into a happy, busy routine. The off days, i make jewelry. The Market days, I sell jewelry to drunk, smiling tourists and curious locals. From my booth, I can hear the brass bands tearing it up at DBAs across the street. Frenchman Street is alive with life: men barbecuing on the corners, beggars wandering about, looking for a cigarette or a dollar, revelers spilling out of every bar clutching plastic go cups of beer. The heat doesn’t waiver, even at 1 in the morning. When the night is over, i load everything into my tiny hatchback and head to a bar with the other vendors. It all feels easy and happy and satisfying.
Every night, I take the same route home. Down Decatur, past the French Market and Cafe du Monde and Jackson Square. Past Canal St, and under the highway, and along Magazine Street — silent now, it’s shops shuttered, everyone in bed or still tucked away on their bar stools at Bon Temps or Ms. Maes. I drive with the radio off and the windows down. I like the quiet, after a night filled with noise and conversation and chaos. After a month of living here, I’ve finally begun to allow myself to accept that all this is real. That this isn’t just a vacation or an illusion or dream. I’m actually starting to create a life down here.
Posted August 19, 2012 at 10:35pm
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Photo: Border crossing - Ecuador/Peru
I never got around to posting the blog entry below, which I wrote during the final weeks of my trip this past winter. I stumbled on it today and thought I’d share. It’s basically a blow-by-blow account of what a typical “travel” day can be like. I’d like to add (since it isn’t covered in the post below) that when Jonathan, Sarina and I finally did reach our destination, we then spent a week ogling mountains and lush green landscapes, hiked a waterfall, chilled out in a laid back beach town, saw some fantastic ruins, and had way too many adventures to list here. The exhausting travel days are always worth it…
The alarm rang at 5:30 AM. I’d only gone to bed two hours earlier, but hitting the snooze button was not an option: the bus to Peru would pass at 6AM, and then not again until evening. My traveling companions were Jonathan, an 18-year-old, bright-eyed, long-limbed German kid who wore square glasses with black frames and had a wave of curly hair that flopped over his forehead, and Sarina, a 21-year-old British girl with porcelain doll features and a smattering of brown freckles across her nose.
The route we’d picked wasn’t going to be an easy one. Our directions dictated two days of straight travel, numerous bus changes, and lots of potential obstacles. We’d met an Aussie at our hostel who’d taken the same route, and he told us that the road was so rough that, afterwards, he couldn’t eat for two days, until his stomach settled. But the payoff promised to be interesting ruins, huge waterfalls and a chance to explore a part of Peru that is far off the usual “Gringo Trail.”
In the day leading up to our departure, I kept wavering as to whether our not I wanted to go at all. Especially when the alternative sounded so tempting: an easy, comfy night bus to the Peruvian coast. I could be relaxing on the beach by 2pm the next day.
No, I argued with myself. I’d just spent a month living in a beach town. Enough with the coast. It was time for a change if scenery.
The Cruz Del Sur bus lumbered around a dusty twist in the road, and shuddered to a stop in front of us. Backpacks got stowed underneath, and we were off. No turning back now. Six bone-jarring hours later, we reached Zumba, where we climbed into a pickup truck and continued on towards the border town of Balsa. We were accompanied by an Argentinian girl who was heading towards Lima.
Since the truck was full, Jonathan tied his sweatshirt around his head to protect himself from the sun and climbed into the truck bed, where he was able to stretch out his long legs over our pile of backpacks. Our guidebook praised the Balsa border crossing, noting that it was far quieter than the border crossings closer to the coast. The promise of a tranquillo border turned out to be the understatement of the year. The barrier that separated Ecuador from Peru was a bamboo stick painted yellow and black, and secured with a scrap of wire. The processing office was a single wooden desk in the dark corner of what looked like a garage. Our border agent emerged from a dark back room, seemingly dressed for a day at the beach. He was wearing madras shorts, a yellow polo, and flip-flops. We crossed the quiet bridge between countries and approached the processing office on the other side.
Only problem: there was no one there. Literally. We couldn’t go any further until our passports were stamped, but the border agent wasn’t due back at his post for another four hours. There was nothing we could do but wait. We dumped our backpacks on the boiling concrete, swigged thirstily from our water bottles and contemplated joining the locals for a swim in the muddy brown river a few meters away. Jonathan and I had just changed into our bathing suits (stripping down in front of the border office, to the amusement of locals) when the border agent suddenly appeared. We were instructed to fill out a few forms, which we took to another office, located in a shed next to a football field where a few donkeys grazed by the goal post.
Ten minutes later, we were back on the road, crammed into an overpriced taxi, the only means of transport available. Our backpacks bounced on our knees as the car shuddered along the pockmarked road. Dirt was everywhere — in my hair, in my eyes, in my mouth. My tongue was coated with it. The taxi driver took the switchbacks and potholes with practiced ease, swerving around herds of ambling cows and the motorcycles that drifted indifferently into the lane meant for oncoming traffic. A stream ran parallel to the road, and, at a few points, over the road. Our driver slowed to drive through the water. Children splashed by the road’s edge and men parked their cars just out of the path of the water, and used sopping rags to wash the dust off their tires and windshields.
Two hours later, we were unloading our backpacks once again: taxis only travel so far. Another dusty Peruvian town, a dusky blue-gray sky, a crowd of local men swarming our group, offering a ride to wherever we needed to go. The Argentinian girl took control. In Spanish far too rapid for me to follow, she negotiated the next leg of our trip, arguing down every Sol. At last, she got the price she wanted, and we headed in the direction of the collectivo that would be taking us to our final destination for the night. We piled in, joining the crush of workers and kids heading home from school, and moms cradling their babies close to their chests. Our knees pressed against the vinyl of the seat in front of us. With a choke, the collectivo sputtered to life, and we were off again.
Banana trees and cornfields butted against the road. Beyond that, massive green mountains stacked on top of each other, unrolling in every direction. The sun sank behind them, turning the sky orange. We slowed only when a procession of bulls blocked the road. They gazed at us with their huge wet eyes as they lazily ambled in the direction of a slow moving creek. The Peruvian man sitting beside me slept heavily on my shoulder.
It began to rain a few kilometers out of Jaen. Our backpacks were bungeed to the roof, but I was too tired to care. The collectivo reached the outskirts of the town, pulled up to a desolate street corner and shuddered to a stop. All the other passengers began to fight their way out, so we did too, though we had no ide where we were or where we were going. A few tuk tuks pulled up, eager for fares. After fifteen straight hours of traveling, something in me was beginning to fray. We were so close to town and now we had to change transport again?
I began to heave my backpack in the direction of the closest tuk tuk when I realized that our Argentinian friend had stepped up again and was negotiating with the collectivo driver to take us into the town center. He agreed, and we sunk back onto the sticky bench seats of the van.
A few minutes later, we were in downtown Jaen. A park square, ringed with farmacias and little chicken joints and a beautiful art deco church with a modern stained glass façade. We were only 2/3 of the way to our final destination, but we’d covered enough ground for one day. Exhausted, coated in dirt and still lugging our backpacks, we all but crawled to a hotel. Split four ways, it was only about $5 a person.
We parted ways with our Argentinian friend the next morning and waved down a tuk tuk to take us to the spot where collectivos departed for all points south. Another day of negotiating rides, switchback and pothole riddled roads, and dust, dust, dust. We strapped our backpacks to the back of the tuk tuk, piled into the tiny carriage and were off once again. Three gringos headed through the stunning landscape of northern Peru.
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I’ve been back in New York for three weeks now. In reality, it seems like much, much longer than that. Probably because I’ve been working a desk job for the last two weeks, which makes every day streeeeeeeetch on endlessly. My return to the 9-5 life has pretty much been terrifying; a serious reality check that I’ve had it far too good for the past few years, and that I’ve grown much too accustomed to doing things my way all the time. Happily, the desk job is pretty much over now. The two 40-hour weeks gave me a much-needed paycheck to help get me back on my feet after a wallet-draining winter, and now I’m back to my usual schedule of non-scheduled activities.
Except that, nothing else in my life is “as usual.” I gave up my apartment in December, which means everything I own, save for the contents of a backpack and a carry-on suitcase, has been in storage for the last five months. At the moment, I’m sorely missing my bike, my running sneakers, and my books. And yet, despite that, I’m finding that I am damn happy to be “homeless.” It’s actually been pretty much nothing but great. I’ve been staying on the couch of a wonderful friend — someone who’s been in my life for years, but who I usually only spend time with a few times a year. But, as roommates, we take evening walks, watch endless episodes of 30 Rock on Netflix, and dine out in her great UWS ‘hood. It’s given our friendship a jumpstart, and reminded me how lucky I am to have her in my life.
Other great friends have been popping up out of the woodwork too, offering beds and couches for me to crash on, or inviting me over for elaborate, delicious dinners. I’ve shared more lunches, dinners, weekend adventures and mid-week happy hours in the past three weeks than I’d typically have in three months. I attribute this all to my homelessness. I’m not bogged down by jewelry orders, ‘cause all my tools are packed, and my “work” hours actually coincide with everyone elses, for once!
I’ve spent the last few weeks marveling at how lucky I am. I think about how I came to New York not know a single soul, and now I’m surrounded by friends and family and places that feel like home.
The irony is that, in recent months, every quiet moment has been colored by the gnawing reality that I’m getting ready to leave. That I spent ten years building a life here — finding friends, filling my apartment with good people and happy memories, building a business and a career, becoming comfortable in a strange and overwhelming place…. and now i’m walking away from all of it. Stepping back to square one. New city, new people, a fresh beginning on my business. I keep asking myself, Why can’t I be satisfied with this wonderful life? Why is it not enough? Do I really understand what it means to start again, ten years older than i was before?
Posted May 31, 2012 at 1:01am
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One last night in NOLA, spent at a crawfish boil on the levee. Sunset over the water, coolers full of beer, friends in every direction.
Posted May 8, 2012 at 6:37am
