Defibrillation

If I haven’t posted recently (and I haven’t, it’s true), it is because I’ve been extremely busy with fun timez. Here’s a (Denny’s-sized) sampler. Enjoi.

Fork-Tender

“The rice—it’s glue. And kale, kale doesn’t go with salmon. What the hell were you thinking? And the salmon is frozen and the potatoes, the knife cuts are, like, ridiculously uneven. Look at this. It’s like a damn apple. Crunchy. Potatoes aren’t supposed to be ‘crunchy.’ And the rice—it’s like glue. Who’d ever think to make kale go with salmon? It’s fucken salmon, and it’s frozen. Was. Frozen salmon. Please learn how to cook properly, and then try just that—this same… dish little bit harder, with a little bit more effort next time, ok?” His smile wasn’t much more than the sketch of a well-sharpened pencil. “It doesn’t take that much thought.” She wasn’t looking up from her plate, which was landscaped like a zen garden of swirled overcooked greens and the occasional lost rice in a fury of tuberous architectural features. “Frozen salmon,” he said, loudly enough, “Frozen.”

Little under twenty-one years prior, she should have known that, when on the night of the day after her marriage her new husband took it upon himself to display his claim for connubial territorial domination by farting under the—very dense, so incredibly, tragically, suffocatingly dense—400-thread count, one-hundred-percent Egyptian cotton sheets of their honeymoon bed of the Taiwan Hotel’s most spacious fifth-floor suite, that there was something wrong. Surely they loved each other very much: She peed as he brushed his teeth in the morning; he’d agonize over constipation without closing the door to the half-bath next to the kitchen after breakfast. Life was harmonious and comfortably inelegant, just as she had dreamed it would be when she found the ‘right guy,’ whatever she meant with those terms. So when it was decided that they would get married in June of 1989, nobody was surprised. There was the detail of the pregnancy, but that had been done away with silently—nobody would know, and the procedure was quick and painless. Uterus squeaky clean, marriage could proceed without much guilt.

And the situation did seem perfect before that night-of-the-day-after at the Taiwan. She’d been horizontal from merely hours after the limo dropped them off and, well, until the methane got to her, and it had been pleasant, as always, and sometimes violent, as she did like it to be violent sometimes, and at other times solemn and ceremonial, which neither enjoyed much, but which seemed necessary to keep things interesting. But sometimes she also wondered about the unthinkable—how it all would have, could have progressed if she had had the child, which she knew would be a boy, who she had strong suspicions would come out of the closet shortly after his sixteenth birthday, who would be found being screwed by the neighbor’s step-son by the cleaning lady, who’d utter a “Dios mio,” or something like that, and who would have shut the door and never mentioned the scenario forever after, but who would still be occasionally plagued by very vivid scenes in her dreams, products of a sexually-repressed Catholic upbringing in Argentina. The joys of parenting would have fixed these problems. They would have made the disappointment more tolerable, and the flatulence less scientifically unfamiliar, more relatable and ‘homier.’ Because then, at least, she’d have a link to him—her husband—a carnal link to serve as a convincing argument for why it was that they had to be together, for why their union just simply made sense.

But, as it happened, the reek was scientific and coolly detached from her perceptions of her husband, who’d at all times until then seemed like such a lovable, huggable, and intimate synthetic person, if a bit robotic and mentally cybernetic. He’d now presented himself as flawed and human, and, above all, as organic, which she never expected. Back then, that was the only sign she received of what was to come. She should have recognized it as a problem, but she chose not to, instead deciding to err on the side of accidental embarrassment, which he’d surely avoided by completely ignoring the situation. Surely.

“Spaghetti is supposed to be al dente. And this tomato sauce is so watery. See how it pools here at the bottom?” he’d say, raising a matted mess of starchy tangles over the edge of his plate (part of a Martha Stewart collection). Indeed, there would be a splash of aqueous, diluted sauce pathetically billowing and circulating along the perimeter of the dish. “Should have let it simmer a bit longer.” She liked the taste of the fresh tomato to be distinctly prevalent in her sauce. “If you simmer—that is, if you don’t boil the hell out of the sauce—then you can thicken it while still keeping that raw taste you like so much. Try a bit harder next time.” Such was the scenario every day since the night-of-the-day-after at the Taiwan, and she’d learned to accept it as simply a fact of married life—that little bouts of criticism and discomfort were healthy, and that complaint could be directed for constructive bonding. It was a convincing lie.

Both nearing their fifties and childless, the marriage would have progressed from periods of novel excitement (~12, 13 hours, max), supreme disappointment and/or regret (~20 years, maybe a couple of months more or less), a sense of futility (another ~20 years or so), and, finally, a certain harmony and mutual understanding brought forth by a collective aging. Love ceased to play a part in their relationship many years ago, and the dependency that had once been defined by their mutual ability to remain together despite the growing consistency with which they fought about trivial matters (“You put the limes in the vegetable drawer???” / “SINGLE PLY?” / “The ‘volume’ line needs to be under the ‘V,’ not the ‘O’…”) had now given way to a singularity defined by solitude, and by their companionship in spiraling slowly toward an inevitable death.

Grit

Downtown Ribeirão Preto changed little since the end of the 19th Century. Still, when taking strolls from alleys to alleyways between Paraguayan electronics boutiques stocked with equipment of questionable legitimacy and Bottega Veneta or BCBGMaxAzria outlets, we tread the same parallelepiped granite rock laid as pavement by Japanese immigrants in late 1909. The Southeast of Brazil is extremely Brazilian: hot ember, and wealthy in a stealthy sense. Roads are old and uneven, the evening sky a Brilliant Blue FCF, but only when not sinister and obscure under cloud cover of seasonal thunderstorms. The mood: electric in the British, Victorian sense: rustic, yet bustling; never asleep, but always cautious. The soil is fertile and highly caffeinated, although in recent years it has become sugary, cloying with the sweetness of the so-called ecological business of ethanol mills. Wealthy, in a stealthy sense: light posts tarnished and park benches and statues and copper features on colonial buildings patinated. The soil is also a deep annatto red; it is blood, and it is life. When we made the move from the confines of the University of Virginia down to Ribeirão, we were spoiled by the Americanism of leaving our shoes by the front door. It did not take long for us to be disabused of the custom, a luxury of the light-, sandy-earthed peoples of the North. And please don’t mistake this for the sentimental journey of a not-quite expatriate with no place in the world, a lost wanderer in search of a home and its comforts. (I have plenty of those.) I write simply on the dilemma and histories of surfaces in Ribeirão Preto, Brazil.

It is about time that I go for something new. I am a pre-schooler, a kindergartener with strong ambitions re popularity and social excellence. All the rage in the early ‘nineties are light-up sneakers, particularly if they feature the branding of SEGA and, better yet, the specificity of Sonic the Hedgehog. No doubt Manuela, one crush, will be impressed by my display of a postmodern tendency to adapt to the evolving cultural milieux of the times, my flawless sense for LED-fashion and electromagnetic accessorizing. She’s gone for the Barbie ones, the ones molded from clear vinyl and varicolored glitter with a pinkish bias, the ones with a staccato of blinking patterns spanning front-to-back the length of ultra-durable rubberized, high-density polyethylene-skeletized soles. And I don’t blame her one bit—they’re impressive, and assertive, and cutting-edge, and, best and most sexy of all, risky: they come with a disclaimer for epileptics. I too need a pair of shoes, preferably featuring SEGA, particularly Sonic the Hedgehog, and a disclaimer for epileptics. Even Chan Marshall goes for the Chanel every once in a while. It’s a quality of people who know how to live and are not afraid of doing so, and doing so well. Forget the Spice Girls; it’s all about a balance between conformity and grit, and ruggedness.

My grandfather is the sycophantic type: married to a spoiled girl, an obsessive smoker and cat-lady, also obsessed with The Beatles (not a bad thing; they’re trendy), Monty Python, Chaplin’s Modern Times, and Marxism and day-old coffee, which we call petroleum, or crude oil, in my house, which is ironic, as far as I know. He purchases me things, my grandfather does. We go downtown every once in a while; we go shopping at the farmers’ market, where they sell artificially-colored sugarwater in LDPE vacuum-molded bottles in the shape of cartoonish mice and rabbits and bears, and where we drink sugarcane juice, freshly squeezed and contaminated by Trypanosoma cruzi, a protozoan I know about, and which is therefore highly risky and highly desirable for the maximization of one’s social functions (cf. paragraph two, line two). We also make the point of visiting Odette, the loud woman who sells cheese, olives, and charcuterie, and who will pass away in a bit less than twenty years, maybe. My grandfather has the annoying habit of guiding me by the neck, which he clamps with his thumb and index finger of the right hand and steers with rude, discontinuous impulses—now this way, now that. If we feel particularly adventurous, we visit the main city market, which is a five-, or maybe ten-, minute drive away, where other old people sell things with a Barthesian grain: maki rolled by the skilled hands of paver families, mozzarella pulled and taffy’d by the oscillatory motions of ex-coffee harvester Italians. These places are well known, but hidden. Such is the stealth. And the parking garage, which holds Audis and Mercedeses and Citroëns without particular biases, is guarded by a rusty gate and a guaranteed overweight elderly person who reads tabloids and listens to AM radio simultaneously. Transactions are made with cash, solely, and there is no receipt. Lighting is provided by light bulbs hung exposed.

Two blocks away we may go to a store where they sell kindergarten status amulets, if I fight against the claw pressing against my jugular vein and making me increasingly desperate w/r/t potential bloodflow restrictions to, and from, my brain, which I value. But I am stubborn and my grandfather has a weak mind, even in his late fifties, so I succeed. I guide the hand and the body attached to it and reach the store, where I will obtain, by monetary exchange, an epilepsy-inducing apparatus. I try several on, but immediately reject anything aside from Sonic [the Hedghehog], and eventually decide on a particular model that appeals to my senses, one which will challenge Manuela’s own UFOlogical laser show, which will potentially lure her to my lair of kindergartenous ambitions. But no, I don’t want these lacy, beige, flimsy socks the saleswoman keeps pushing on me. I said I don’t want the socks. Do I have to put on the socks? Screw it. I’ll take my cash back, thankyouverymuch.