Oscar Wilde: Lady Windermere's Fan

"Puedo resistirlo todo salvo la tentacíon."

"I can resist everything except temptation."





Now ain't that the truth.  How weak does that make me?  Who knows, but I never said I was strong.

I do sympathize with her.  I really do.  I've lived in those shoes before and it sucks.  Being there, everyday, in both situations.  One person, two different pairs of shoes.  When I knew Callan, I had these shoes right?  And she had these other shoes, a little bit newer looking, but whatever.  I'm not a girl, I don't have twenty pairs of shoes in my closet.  I have just one pair that I run through , in and all around these four corners with.  I wear them 'til they wear out most times.  Then I got out and get a new pair.  That's more or less the routine with me.

Callan moved in when Mike moved out.  In the winter, just after New Year's, and Mike moved back to LA.  The homeland.  Winters aren't so bad down there.  Winter in the North are wild.  Santa Cruz ain't no big city, it's small-town.  Surrounded by green all year.  In the winter the beast in the woods and the beasts of then sea and the sky wake up too, and everything's darker.  More dangerous.  Berating.  Debilitating.  Humid cold.  And we were dead broke and didn't want to shave that extra money off the paychecks for the room heaters.  Not in the living room anyways.

Instead, I bundled up.  The air was always cold.  Maybe that's why I smoked a lot.  Yes, I think I'll blame it on that.  The cold in my bones in the wet raging winter is the reason.  I only had Vans from back home.  Thin canvas, I needed to keep my lungs warm.

Callan's were more boots built to last.  Things you take in to get repaired.  Or you just do it yourself, you know?  Like a man.  Lock it away.

She moved in with no money.  We both lived off the food from Kelly's.  I mean Monster too, and sometimes Mikey, especially when we were high.  But for the most part it was Callie and me.  Two different sets of shoes.

[I'm listening to No Doubt in a t-shirt at a café in Buenos Aires in August.  Es una bella dia.]

She's in my shoes now, or the ones I had I should say.  Me, I've grown I guess.  I've got thick soles and tough black leather on my toes now.  There's no holes.  The water doesn't get through, and there's nice padding too.  They're nice to walk in, and they'll last fucking forever.  But sometimes I step on someone else's toes.  Temptation is a two way street.  

[to be continued]

Winter's Wild South

LA as a city, really, changed since last I remembered it, like really lived in it.  It was still the same LA, the same one since childhood three years ago.  Before university, before Europe.  The waxy poetic type would be all like, "or maybe it's me that's changed through these years, maybe my eyes and my mind betray me."

Pero no.  I mean, maybe sure, maybe I changed, that's possible.  Probable? Definitely.  But I'm telling you man, that city changed too.  Just like we all did, some more than others.  For me, it was moving away from being the city of my youth (mind you, that will always be in sight, in the street signs and the lights), and slowly becoming the city of my life.  It was still my youth, I told myself, but my definition of youth had changed, from something in high school, to a part of adulthood.  We were adults now.

At least some of us were.  I went back to living at home, sleeping under my parents' roof and working at the surf shop.  I didn't know what the hell I wanted from life, but it was summer in Los Angeles, summer by the beach in Santa Monica, which doesn't leave one wanting much.  Especially with two ounces of weed from Josh - one of Sour Diesel, one of Blue Dream - sitting shotgun in the old weathered wicker basket.

Yes, those were good days.  After-work specials with Savanna, a delight.  So were the nurse and the ad agency girl, but for much different reasons.  I loved Savanna.  It just so happened to be that timing was never our thing though, so instead we have this beautiful friendship instead.  Come to think of it, that's happened with a lot of girls and me.  Maybe timing was never MY thing.  I'm sure Savanna's is just fine.  She knows a thing or two about rhythm.

But here's the thing.  I know a thing or two about rhyme.  It's a comfortable mix.  Things came easy between us.  It was a good thing we had when I came back to the shop.  She had an on-again/off-again boyfriend, and I had recently discovered my charm in Santa Cruz.  Or something like that.  Whatever it was that had come to me, women weren't a problem like they had been.  Neither were girls for that matter, but I was always curious.  We went to lunch sometimes.  I had questions about girls.  She had stories about guys.  And her eyes always flirted with mine.

BsAs: I'm Back With Helen

It's  a stoned, starving bus ride on the 110 out to Palermo.  Off on Scalabrini Ortiz, through the park, to the big windows and the worn wood chairs and square tables to match.  The temperature in here is just perfect.  The light's just right.  The mood's fit and I'm hungry to write.  Not before some eggs and salad though.  I got a front row seat.

The old soft-cover's done.  I've written it's last pages.  For now anyways, and so it's on to this new hardcover for good now.  Too be true, I already started it.  It's been a back and forth.  I've never done that before, start a new notebook before the old one's done.  Well, people change I guess. Sure, boys will be boys, but those boys got to turn into men someday.

It's a shame the music stopped.  I was just going to start writing.  Oh wait, there it is.  Soft jazz.  I can barely hear the bass and the loud keynotes only, and the trumpet when it's there. But it's most certainly there.  Behind a high chorus of life around me en español.

Stevie Nicks, thank you for helping me see the light.  And the white pinto bean of a car across the street too.  Thank you.  Old Citroen, thank you.  Classic sticks around a little longer here in Latin America.

People still read books!

Less cars are new, and more are older in condition.  Of course there's a number that are absolutely wrecked, on cinder blocks in the street.  There's also no stop signs on many intersections.  They're smarter than that, I guess.

It's the Wild West(South) out here.  Á Helena's Resto.

BsAs: Start Winter

Primero, permítanme decir que mi español es mierda.  Todas mierda.  I don't know Spanish any more  than a fifth grader knows physics.  It's strange to say that I love writing so much, and to think that the English language comes easy, and yet, every other language is a stick in the wind to me.

The one thing I've never tried to do, is be something I'm not.  That's a lie, of course.  The last time I did, I ended up with a certificate in Design.  What I'm saying is that usually, I see my weaknesses.  I understand them.  And I rarely try to pursue them.  I'd prefer to chase my strengths.  And so, I'm writing again.  In English, as always.  A siempre.  It was a lonely year on the west coast, and presently, a wild winter in the South, past the equator.  I'm in the Spanish melting pot of Bueno Aires.  Y mi español, mierda.  Yes, it's a pity.

But that's what keeps me focused.

[this is a story about hypocrisy]

Winter Is Cloudy

It's a foreboding way to start the new year.  In the back of my car with a girl that fucked me in the port-potty straight on through the end of the show and everybody leaving.  We'd come out and everybody'd been gone.  Even through the insane MDMA high, cold dread crept through my fingertips at the sight of the empty warehouse and the grip of that girl's hand in mine, and my lips whispered, "Fuck."

Someone had taken my three hundred dollar Kenneth Cole peacoat too, but that was the least of my bothers at the time.  I chalked it up to the ticket price that I hadn't paid, it was gone, and there were a number of other left-behind jackets lying around so I just picked through them until I picked up one that felt right, and i ended up with a black sleeping bag of a trench coat thing.  A puffy cape pretty much, and I immediately fell in love with it.  It wasn't hard, to fall in love with that thing.  It was economical, and cozy, and warm and comforting, and my heart was flooding at that moment, and the girl latched onto my arm, saying words to me that I didn't hear ("hey, what should we do now? let's go somewhere, take me somewhere, somewhere for just you and me"), wasn't near enough worthy of what the dam of my emotions was holding back.  I gave it all to the coat.  She just tagged along.  Something absolutely horrible had happened somewhere in the last two hours, when I was dancing high and blind in the middle of the thick crowd by the stage that night.  Both our phones were dead.

I slept in that coat that night, on the flat back of my old trusty Sport parked up a hill four blocks away.      I put the back seats down and opened the jacket up, and we both slept on it, that random girl and me, because my phone was dead, and hers was too, and it was late, after 2:00, after 3:00 even.  All alone with everything closed on New Year's, no where to go except my car, which was a long walk from the pier as the drugs were wearing off.  With this girl.  She wanted to play still, in my car, she put her legs behind her head, "See? Come on, take it."

But I told her I was too high and rolled to face the beige plastic and curled into a ball and cried under the guise of deep drug breathing and withdrawal shivers.  I'd lost it.  I'd lost her.  Last night in the blind white of haze of the high and the lights, I'd lost sight of what I really wanted.  The who and the why had escaped me for just a few hours.

Life's funny like that though.  I'd been hooked.  Enamored again by someone I knew I should not be in love with, what a horrible idea, but it always looks so good at the time, feels so right and universal, like it's meant to be, before anything real happens and everything is a possibility still.  It looks so good then, blonde hair, blue-eyed by my side.  It could happen.  It could've, I should say.  Not after this.  The whole stars aligning to bring us together bullshit, if that's actually a thing stars do in collusion amongst themselves up there, if that's true and real, then that alignment for us was that night, last night, with me and Callie, and in those few hours I'd missed it.  Our courses had crossed but didn't change, headings same, but away now, away from each other off to the mountains with my thoughts.  That course was a dark one.  In winter.

Spiraling out.

BsAs: Belgrano Afternoon

I better write this down before I forget it.  And as the clouds evidenced this afternoon, things can change in nothing more than a flurry up the stairs at Freddo to the terrace.  Sunny outside to cloudy in the blink of an eye.  Two flights up.  This will be my curse, I'll always wish to have had my camera out sooner.  That and beautiful women.

But ah!  There, like I said.  Things like thoughts are fleeting like the clouds and the sun outside.  So if you want to remember it, write it down.  Guada said, "You can live a different life out here."

And for the first time in a long while I thought to myself, "But I don't want a different one.  I like my life."

I'm not running away, I'm running towards something now.

Cowboy Birthdays in the Winter

There's a respect for good food among cowboys.  Not in the gourmet sense though, no.  It's in a sense of making a good tasting meal lout of the most barest of ingredients.  The minimal essentials.  Simple meat on fire.  Beans overs fire, or soup, and charred bread, but only lightly charred.  It takes a certain and particular skill and a refined hand and timing.  There's an affinity with fire for a gaucho, for a real cowboy.  Fire and smoking.  Rough cigarettes.  No filters, black tobacco, the darker the better because that's what flavor is.  In the darkness, in the black crushed pepper of things.  And in good food too, don't forget.

I know a thing or two about dark flavor.  For my birthday I smuggled an older chocolate ganache cake out of the bakery at the end of the day.  Well, I didn't exactly smuggle it.  There was a gaping crack in the smooth exterior of it, this rich chocolate wheel on its side, and it was my birthday, so Emily let me have it.  "We certainly can't sell it, no one's going to buy this, here. Happy birthday," she said.  It took some charming though, I told myself, and I loved flirted with Emily's hazel eyes, loved to watch the dimples in her cheeks grow as she smiled.

I also took a full pint of lentil soup, there was a lot left over that day.  It wasn't like the clam chowder, which was always gone come 7:00.  That's not to say it wasn't good.  All the soups they made at Kelly's were amazing, definition forms of their names and of the richest lip-licking flavors, and never overdoing the salt, which is cheating, but also a bit difficult with the more mundane varieties.  Like the lentil.  But Kelly never disappoints.  She somehow brings the vegetable flavors out to the forefront, right alongside the lentil, and some other spicing that I know is there, I can taste it, but I can't quite make out what it is.  There's real skill in her recipes, Kelly.

As always, I also grabbed a full bag of pastries; gingersnap cookies, chocolate chip, some scones, some almond buns, and, my favorite, a handful of powdered apple slippers.  It was my birthday dammit!

Matt's delivery shift ended just about the same time mine did, and he brought over my favorite pizza from Pizza My Heart, the walnut apple one, and a gift from Josh.    "Josh rolled them, but I put the whole thing together.  Oh, and the thing between the legs is a little hash dick."

To be concise, as closely as I can, it was a marijuana scarecrow made of spliffs and toothpicks with a little photo-copy of my face taped to the top.  I think I still have the skeleton of the thing in my dad's old briefcase somewhere.  Four spliff limbs and a little hash dick.  It wasn't so little though.  And there was a big fat nugget of Blue Dream in the middle as the body.  "Oh and he said one of the spliffs he dipped in hash oil, so... Surprise! Happy Birthday!" And he gave me a lanky long strong Matt hug, the kind I'm accustomed to, the one's when I know he really means it, and kind of squeezes the breath out of me.

Max and Chase Knowles were up for the weekend, and Taylor was over from the city, staying with Sasha.  It was a three-day, for Martin Luther King, Jr.  After more than a few too many shots of tequila and shotgunned beers, we all wore onesies out to the Blue Lagoon for 80's night like the good old Western/King Street days. Thank god we had enough onesies, which is to say thank god Monster had a rather superfluous and questionable collection of onesies.  Nobody was asking questions that night though.  It was my birthday.

I opted for the hooded pink zebra-print onesie.  Monster wore her white tight sailor onesie, and Chase wore her mother's 80's onesie with the black stirrup tights and the shoulder pad denim top all stitched together somehow.  And he'd just buzzed his head before coming up.  More like he Bic'ed it really.  He looked like a bald lesbian with sunglasses on.  He's that handsome.  Matter of fact we were all handsome.  And pretty.  And beautiful, like good friends should be.  And we smoked one of my legs before we left, and all wore sunglasses out.  I forget who drove, probably Mike, with Alix sitting shotgun, and the rest of us packed into the back seat and the trunk of the Black Mamba.  He pulled into the lot on Cedar with a lurch and the slightest screech and luckily there weren't any cops about.  There never were, which I guess was wishful thinking and dumb luck, but it happened to be true.  We were damned near locals in that little town by then, we knew all the side streets and how to get downtown without so much as seeing another headlight.  Easy-peasy.  Good drunk-driving practice, and we piled out of the Mamba like it was a goddamn clown car, ten of us.  Buzzing.  High.  Lively and loud and ridiculous, slugging more beers, as many as we could before getting to the bar.

Birthdays at the Blue Lagoon were always great with everyone was a little high.  And free drinks, don't forget.  Well, not free, but I certainly didn't pay for them.  I don't think.  I don't remember much after midnight, except a kiss from Callie on the cheek before she put me to bed in the living room.

BsAs: El Asador

"I am the asador, see?" said Chetoba.  "And an asador always has an assistant.  Do you know what a good assistant does?"

"Um... Hold the tools?" I guessed.

"Keep my wine glass full," he said smiling.

"Oh, I can do that." It was a Malbec from the ancient wine cellar next to the river.

"The oldest wine dealer in Argentina" the man in the clean black shirt had said after Chetoba told him I only spoke English.  Then he regaled us with stories from the past.  Bottles waiting ten years for customers, the old days, and the catacombs, and the reason a toast is called a toast.  "It's because the they used to put pieces of toast in their glasses if the wine was especially shitty, and then they'd say, 'toast' to remember to take it out before they drank it."

That was my kind of place, although I only believed maybe half of what the bald goateed merchant told us.  There were bottles everywhere.  An adobe crypt down an old staircase with rows of dusted reds and candlelight.  Bury me alive, I love this place.  I ended up buying four bottles: two reds, a sauvignon blanc, and a rosé.  Chetoba got another bottle of malbec and a bottle of Frenet Branca.

I had been drinking Frenet con Cocas all last night.  It was good.  A lot of spanish and me making up stories for the words I heard and didn't understand, which was most of them.  I had my notebook too. Don't worry though, the stories were shit.  I didn't even write them down.  I'd been busy with other things, like wondering how to write a book.

Anyways, Chetoba and I polished off the first bottle of Malbec with impressive haste as we finally got all the meat onto the grill.  It was a mountain of meat.  All kinds, all cuts.  Pork slice, pork rib, filet mignon, bife de chorizo, regular old carne and regular old chorizo too, and this incredible blood sausage called morcilla.  The chimney on the grill was a smokin' when we corked the second bottle.  It was a red blend that Chetoba had picked out for me at the Bodega.  It was better than the first even, a Malbec x Cereza blend bottled by DaDa.  I was a good assistant.  And Chetoba, he as a regular gaucho behind the grill, that guy.  A dash of salt, a spread of herbs, but not too much.

"Gaucho is not gourmet," he told me.  "It's simple."  He told me everything about asado.  How to bring the coals up to heat on the side before shifting them under the grill.  It's different than BBQ in the States.  Chetoba's grill wasn't fancy, just an outfitted oil drum on a rack with a chimney and a shelf on one side and a place to heat the coals on the other.  I good old-fashioned smoker.  But just under the iron grill-sheet there was a layer of ceramic bricks laid out under the whole thing.  When the coals were ready, he slid them onto the bricks, right under the meat, with a little flat-spade shovel, like something you'd find next to a nice fireplace.  

"You can order these meats in a nice restaurant with marinade and fine sauces and spices, but that's not Gaucho.  Gaucho lived on the land with just a fire and the cows and chorzio - you know, the pigs. Simple.  Nothing fancy.  But we still make the meat good.  You have to know what to choose at the carniceria.  If you don't choose, and just ask for bife de chorizo, for example, yes, they give you bife de chorizo, but definitely not the best.  You see this?"  He pointed to a thick white piece of ligament or cartilage or what have you on a crackling piece of beef.  "The white eye, you see?  These are the best cuts.  That's the best flavor, right there.  And see this?"  He poked the meat just next to one of the white eyes and it squealed with the steam and smoke.  "The meat's softer there, not so, um... how do you say..."

"Chewy?" I guessed.

"Yes. Not so chewy.  Or tough, you know?" he said, pounding a fist into his other hand.  "It's soft.  Tender! That's the word.  It's tender."

"Mmm. Tender's good," I say.  

We eat outside at a simple concrete table outside, decorated in colorful simple, yet beautiful ceramic mosaic on the seats.  The tablecloth was flying around in the wind, almost knocked over the wine, until Chetoba's wife came out, glass in hand, half-full, and a green salad and bread, and tied the corners under the tabletop, and we ate.  Tito and Sofie came out too with a set of simple wooden plates and forks and knives.  We could hear the wind in the tall eucalyptus groves on the other side of the wall, it was whipping, monstrous, like a waterfall through the trees and the lore nests.  We couldn't even hear them and their cacophony anymore over the sunlight thunder.  In the compound though, it was only light gusts.  It was a lovely lunch.

The meat exploded in my mouth.  First the pork slice.  Crispy.  Then the filet.  Then the bife de chorizo, my God.  We just ate it straight as Chetoba served it right off the grill, in what felt like a very specific order.  After the bife, a thick slice of carne, then the morcilla.  My god.  Coagulated blood never tasted so good.  It's a strong flavor, mixed with onion and spices inside.  Amazing.  And finally the chorizo and pieces of thick provolone Chetoba had cooking in a tin on the grill at the very end, just to soften it up a bit.  Through the whole thing, Chetova was always talking, explaining, storytelling, mystifying in my mind the Gaucho way.  Like a Latin cowboy Homer.  Around the dinner table.  That was his way.  To pass on stories.  Keep them alive through their telling.  Gauchito Gil.  His island paradise.  The road trip to Mountain View.  All the travelers that came through.  

"There was this one Australian and his wife," he started.  "Every year or so, maybe every two years, randomly, I'd get a call from him because they were in Argentina, and he'd say, 'Chetoba, get the asado ready, I'm in Argentina.  And he'd come, and we'd go to the Bodega.  He was always drunk this guy.  A stumbler."  He did his best impression, swaying and dazed in the face.  "He'd go up to the counter, stumbling, and say, 'What's your best red wine?' and they'd look at him puzzled and um... apprehensive, yes.  Because he was so drunk and stumbling. Maybe they thought he was going to steal it, I don't know.  But they would look at me, and I shrug, and they would show him and he would say, 'Good, I want a case.' He would get two cases! And we would come back and I would make asado everyday, and he would buy the finest wines, and the meat too!  We ate like kings and queens," he said looking at his wife.  "And we drank well.  Like kings too.  When they would leave, I would have boxes of wine stacked in the living room.  It was a good business.  The last time he came, his wife wasn't with him though, I think it was all the drinking, and the swaying.  But he was a good man."

[stop]

Winter Dreaming

When you leave California summer headed to Buenos Aires, you're going straight into winter.  They're the harsher months.  The months a man keeps his face unshaven to keep the cold out.  A mature beard defines a man, this is true, but cowboys aren't mature, most of them ain't really.  They're just boys after all.  They live out on the plains and desert hills, not up in the mountains with the men.  They shave, or at least put a blade to it every once in a while because they're handsome, and girls like handsome cowboys with sharp jaw-lines and a clean neck.  They usually got a girl at home keeping them warm every night.  The warmth of a woman in bed at night trumps any beard, no matter how manly.  A man don't always have that as an option though.  They got to get rough, rugged for warmth in the cold winter months.  Most times the going gets lonely.

As far as definition goes in life, I don't know where I was in Santa Cruz in December. I was sleeping on a mattress in the living room of a first-floor flat at the foot of the mountains by the sea.  What else does a man want, I wonder?  It wasn't the desert plains and golden hills of the Wild West, and the mountains were right there, but it was a cowboy life for me that year.  North Coast cowboy, in the woods, on the sea.  Josh and Matty lived up on the mountain with their always healthy facial growth, but Mike, Mikey, and me kept clean down by the Great Highway.

They both had girls, Mike and Mikey.  Not me though.  I only had a crush on one.  That's all it takes for a clean face, but this one, she was out of my league.  Me and Callie caravanned up to Santa Cruz after Christmas  But she wasn't driving up from San Diego.  I was going to meet her on the road.  In Santa Barbara.  A weekend party in SB with old friends and ex-boyfriends.  She has a way about her, Callie.  He's incredibly well gifted at making boys fall in love with her.  But there's something else too.

I met her just before sunset at the pier.  I wasn't raining, but it just had, hours ago, and the storm was off in the distance over the water, down by the point to the south spread over the sky like pink and red and orange in a darkening sky, far, far away out of reach.  We dined at a quiet cafe restaurant at a beachy hotel with a view of the ocean.  Nothing so fancy.  A small beachtown family-run place.  The soup of the day was clam chowder, so I got that.  Callie just ate some of the free rolls and ordered a tea with a lemon slice and some honey.

"Rough night?" I said.  She looked like hell.

She let out a slow breath and the blue in her eyes came into focus with her surroundings in that magnificent dazed sort of way that she has.  She was looking outside.  "Oh yeah. It got real weird.  And molly-y."  She looked at me and it was a soft, but calculating face, mildly intrigued by my pending reaction.  "I snuck out the window of Nate's room two hours ago." Wide blue eyes.

"Nice."  Nate was ex-boyfriend Nate, and the window, she told me, was on the second floor.  I pretended to be good at this.  "How was that?"

"Ugh. Awful. I mean the sex was whatever. No, not even. It sucked kinda, I was just high. But now I know for sure.  I'm over him."  Prying blue eyes.  "Oh! did you get a ticket for New Year's yet?"  New Year's was Steve Aoki in a big pier warehouse concert in San Francisco.  On the bay.  I didn't think I was going, but all of a sudden I really wanted to.  It was three hundred dollars.  To think about it, I was fairly certain i wasn't going.  After all, I was broke.

I said, "No." I felt ashamed.  "Not yet."

"Me neither!" She was broke too.  Mike and Eric and Kristen and Taylor and all the other meows already had their tickets, but not us apparently.  "But we have to go.  We have to! I think I'm just going to sneak in.  Say I'm on the list or something."

"Ha, yeah me too."

"I'm serious! You should too, it's not that hard."

"I'll probably just buy a ticket," I said, although I didn't have the faintest clue how.

"They're sold out. I checked."

There goes that.  "Well... balls."  I'd make the most of it, I thought to myself.  Maybe just hang out at a bar or a house party or something nearby until 2:00 when the show was over.

"You're coming," she said seriously.

"Yes ma'am."

"Ok, good."

We hit the road in the dark and took turns taking the lead up the 101 and texted each other sweet stupid nothings with lots of dry flirting and humor.  I'm usually better at watching myself in situations like this.  Actually wait, no.  Maybe now I am, but back then I was still a heavy-hearted romantic.  And those eyes.  I could see her smiling in the texts on the dark road, through the valley and into Santa Cruz past midnight.  She slept on the couch though, with the pillows kicked off, but we shared the room and a goodnight spliff and little one-off comments that got softer and airier in the early morning until we both fell asleep.  She dozed off first while I laid there on my mattress on the floor with my eyes closed, trying to follow.  What a fucking thing it is, falling in love.  I hate it now, I really do.

BsAs: Cordoba

I'm in the country now.  No longer Buenos Aires, no Capital Federal.  The bus was a tall double-decker.  Three hundred fifty pesos.  We originally wanted to take the train, which was, at the cheapest seat, eighty pesos, and at a rather nice seat, one hundred pesos, but as luck would have it the trains were completely booked until September.  Mes pelotas.

The bus was nice though.  We had seats on the upper deck, and they were big captain seats with a good recline and arm rests and a padded board that came down in front for your legs, so that it was quite easy to sleep through the morning and noon.  

I woke up on the road.  Nice elevated.  It was green on both sides like the 101, but flatter, much flatter  with the horizon stretching way out on either side, more like the 5.  The sky was restless like it wanted to rain, and it did for a bit, but only just.  It's uncanny.  The seven hour ride.  Small country towns.  Sprawling rows of fields, and old trucks and tractors chugging along on dirt roads off the highway.  It's very similar.  In California all the towns are in Spanish too.  Just about all of them up the coast and through the Salinas river valley - Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, Santa Maria, San Luis Obispo, San Jose, and finally Santa Cruz.

The town of Villa Maria.  Small, but not too small.  It's a two square town, one on that expansion tip, with new universities and new buildings and new homes across the river and such.

We arrived late, but not too late on Thursday.  After sunset.  Before dinner.  Walter picked us up from the bus station and told us a little of his town, not much, pretty much everything I'd just said.  The rest was in spanish to Guada, but it was more than enough for me.  I've become accustomed to observation here in Argentina.  Trading on expression.  The Quiet American.

It's easy to get lost in your thoughts when you don't understand a damned thing and you stop stringing to listen.  It's letting go, and it's nice.  Outside on the concrete porch in this walled grassy compound.  Lounge chairs.  Yerba mate and sugar cookies for breakfast.  The spanish out here in the country sounds like a song in my ears when I'm writing, telling an unknown story.  Digging in the dirt with no treasure map.

That's messy syntax, that's what that is, but then again, that year in California was anything but well-structured.  Hardly clean-cut.  And the weather here, and the wild and the sounds of the birds and the sun remind me so much of Santa Cruz.

Guess I'd better start writing.

In The Winter, I Didn't Know What To Do With My Life

I was twenty-two years old.  I had a Bachelor's degree in Economics from the University of Santa Cruz.  But what comes next?

Real life.  That's what comes when schooling's run its course, and for some that comes sooner than others, and others later, after more schooling, but by God, believe you me, it's coming.  It comes for all of us.  It came for me in 2010.  I was twenty-two years old, and I wasn't ready for it.

So what did I do?  Well, I ran for it.  I ran like hell.  Only looking back in the rearview mirror on the 101.  My parent's house in LA didn't feel like home.  It felt empty.  Lacking somehow.  The way a black and white photo would titled "Red Rose".

I liked taking photographs.  When I was still in school, I would take Monster's SLR, her Canon Rebel, and play for the day.

She had three years left, she was going to be a sophomore that year, Erica.  My little sis.  My buddy Mike, my best oldest friend, was going to be a super senior that year, but only for fall quarter.  He'd walked with us the previous spring at graduation, robes and all, they juts hadn't given him a diploma. Just a dozen or so units was all he needed.  So naturally they were going to live together.  While we had been in Europe, Monster and BB had found this cozy little two bedroom apartment just down the hill from the old palace on Western.

It felt good, moving them in.  It felt right and nice, generically so.  It was natural, and the sun and the crisp mountain air by the sea was as intoxicating as the spliffs and the IPAs, and Santa Cruz was the last home I really knew so that's what I latched onto, that's where I ran.  I told myself I'd be writer, which sounded well enough in my head. There was a beautiful simplicity to the idea of it, and it looked swell, or at least well enough through those Casa Nova lenses I had at the time, all flooded with cool blue fading light and romanticism.

As far as places to run away to write go, Santa Cruz was pretty much perfect.  I had friends there, new friends and close friends and young acquaintances and old role models an hour north in the big city.  I had friends like family there.  And I had healthy surf with a strong ocean and a flowering abundance of weed and forests and mountains and fresh air, and a university campus on a hill that looked stunningly across the Monterey bay on clear days, clear across.  It's like a fairytale, Santa Cruz.  It was absolutely lovely.

[stop]

The Winter Players

It was a quick decision in my mind.  Simple.  I wanted to live with my friends in Santa Cruz.  Like college again without the proper schooling.  I didn't want to go back to Los Angeles.  My parents protested of course, but I waylaid their anxiety with talk of looking for a real job.  That seemed to be enough.  I was going to live in Santa Cruz.  Nothing felt more right.

Of course Mike was cool with it, he was as stoked as I was.  Monster was more hesitant.  After all, it wasn't just the two them sharing the new place.  Her friend from home, from high school in Laguna Beach, was transferring up to Santa Cruz in the fall.  Turns out his name was also Mike, but everyone called him Mikey.  "I mean, I'm cool with it, you staying here, but what are you going to do? You can't just live on the couch," she said.

"I'll help with rent," I told her.  "And I have my mattress still."

"Where're you going to put all your stuff?"

"The hall closet maybe? I don't have much."

"Well, you're going to have to run it by Mikey first.  He'll be up on Tuesday."

The original plan was that Mike and Monster would split the master bedroom and Mikey would take the second bedroom to himself.  I was auxiliary.  Extra baggage.  But so was Nick for that matter.

Nick had lived in a tent in the backyard of Mike's old house on King Street the previous year.  That crazy year.  Nick worked with the kayak rentals on the pier, and he always let us take them out for super cheap.  Since the lease started on the first of September, he had watched over the place on Grandview for the first two weeks or so, living free of charge pretty much.  That was his way.  He was a happy-go-lucky coaster with a big smile and big wild frizzy hair.  He had a couple years on Mike and I, and a handful on Monster, and he looked it too.  Not in his eyes, but in the face surrounding them.  He was a bigger guy too, in the way that hurt if he sat on you, and slightly suffocated if he laid on you.  Come to think of it, he just about suffocated me when he sat on me too.  But he was harmless, and he meant well.  A big grizzly teddy bear, the kind you win at the fair for your girl, and he smoked 50/50 spliffs, half weed, half tobacco, which is a beastly spread for anyone, especially without a filter or even a crutch like the way he always rolled them in his lap with his pouch of Bali Shag that got all over the place.

Actually, what am I saying.  He rolled more 10/90 spliffs which were nearly all tobacco and just a pinch of weed.  To make the stuff last, you know.  They were heinous on the throat and heavy on the buzzing light-headedness.  A big boy, Nick, who like to conserve his weed.  I'll say this though, he wasn't fat, just big-boned in a very literal sense.  He rode a big old 8'0 shortboard when he surfed and he rode a mountain bike everywhere, regularly up the steep section of Western before the bus-stop and the old house at 440.  He was strong, and he smoked grizzly spliffs and devoured food and was sleeping in his bamboo big chair that looked like a satellite dish a little and just barely held his weight.  It lurched and made noises near snapping whenever he shifted himself in it, but it always held true, and when he rustled to when we first swung the doors open at 903 Grandview he nearly fell out of the damned thing getting up.  I hadn't seen him in months.  Not since school.  At first glance, he reminded me of a young Santa Clause for some reason.  Clean-shaven.  Disheveled.  Bubbly and red in his big nose and his thick arms and his face from all the summer sun.

"Oh, hey you two!  Let papa bear get his paws on ya!"  He came up quick and grabbed us, one under each arm and squeezed.  He shook Mike a little harder than me, but I still had to catch my breath when he let go.

"Hey there, big guy."

[stop]

BsAs: Vamos Argentina! 113'

The biggest difference for me here?  It's not difficult to say, but in truth many things are the asme here as they were in Paris.  I'm living with a girl (although I wasn't fucking Lili), the cold chill of fall turned to winter is in the air, I'm writing (although not as much admittedly).  No, the big difference for me is the music.  It can't follow me wherever I go because the headphone jack on my iPhone is busted.  So there's no option to tune everything out.

My ears are left to suffer the sounds of the real world.  In the streets walking, on the bus, on the train.

I don't mind it really.  If I think right, I can find the music just about anywhere.  In anything.

Or maybe it's not about the music at all.  Maybe I've had enough of it, too much of it.  Hiding behind headphones and preferred bands and what I want to hear, and me, me, me.  It must be my music, my music, mine.  And all the while I was blind, or I should say deaf to this grand symphony jazz orchestra surrounding me, always playing, percussion, treble, the vibration of the bus engine and it's whistles and it's squeals, and all the tremors of the street, the dog barks and the beautiful Spanish, the kind I'd never heard before until now, here in Buenos Aires.  It's not coarse Mexican, or the tongue of his Spain, but this deep passionate Argentine, from deep in the heart, deep Latin that keeps time in this song that insists on soldiering on, only changing through the movements.

This is life in Buenos Aires.

Maybe this is what everyone means when they talk about growth.  I feel older than before.  It takes much less time to acclimate to new cities now.  I'm developing a knack for it, I guess.  That is if you can look pass my glaring language barriers.

For the final we went to Ferdinand's.  He used to be Guada's boss when she worked for his investment firm near Retiro, where we had watched the game against Belgium in the park.  His flat's across the street in fact, floor three with two balconies overlooking the park, which was, by the time we got there, already packed and flooding out onto the streets with some 50,000 Argentines so that the slope of the hill looked less like a grassy knoll and more like a sea of flowers azul with flags waving and all dancing in the wind.  The roar was just as deafening as the sight of it, so that we had to yell to hear each other while we smoked Lucky Strikes on the balcony and drank Compari.

[stop]

Why Is It Always Winter

Because winter is a season of strength.  Enduring.  Winters are what make a man.  It's a wet dog shivering in the rain season.  It's frost in the bone, and hair on the chest.  Fortitude.  There are two kinds of men.  No, that's a lie.  In this thinking... there are not kinds.  A man is not either one or the other, except on only the rarest and most transubstantiate occasions.  The kinds heralded for bad movies.  No, not kinds.  There are two forces in winter on a man.  One putting soul into him.  One putting it out of him.  What defines a man in the real season is how much pull these forces have, whatever they are.  It's a real season, winter.  It gives man reality.  It teaches him to deal with fear and self-doubt.  And then on the other side, there's summer that drives a man crazy.  Autumn is that falling in between.  From light into dark.  From grace.  Like butterfly to caterpillar.  Maybe winter is rebirth.  Or is that spring?

I don't know.  But it's winter calling now.  The cold winds and the rain.  What do cowboys do in the winter?  I don't know.  They bring the hay in from the fields... Pull the bootstraps up and tight... They chop wood in the day for the fire they know they're going to need at night.  They're more wary of danger, because in winter danger's more dangerous, more deadly.  Especially in the north.  Santa Cruz isn't true north, but for an LA kid it's plenty north enough.

The drive up at night is a different game entirely.  If you're not on the 101 before 5:00 in the afternoon, your pretty much fucked, and you're not getting to Santa Cruz before midnight.  If it has to be a night game, I prefer to leave a little later actually.  Let the traffic die down.  I like open road.

I picked Mike up after dinner, about 8:00.  It had been a good Thanksgiving, wrought with the usual mischief of home and heavy drinking.  But we were fed.  And well rested.  Ready to go, two splits for the road, and some healthy new tunes on the phone, and of course, a mountain of the old.  It's a nice mix.  We burn down the first spliff on the 90 and on, onto the 405.  The lanes were thick, but at least they were moving.  After hours moving on a Sunday, after the weekend traffic.  Wasn't much up until Santa Barbara around 9:30, and even then, it was just a little slowing.  And after that, open highway.  On through Santa Maria and San Luis Obispo in the dark.  And through another spliff.  Steinbeck country.  The Salinas River Valley let's you stretch out, and stretch out I did on the gas.  There's a little section through the hills and the dry basin that sets the limit at 70 mph.  So I always go 80 or so.  With loud music.  Eighty's a little shaky in the old Sport.  I think her shocks were blown out years before, after all, she's a '99.  And her steering's real loose and too.  That always makes things fun.  And the swerving smooth.

Around King City, I was thinking to myself, thank God for electronic dance music because fuckin' hell I'm high and it's late out.  But we were making good time.  Mike was laughing every now an again at texts from Jackie or Alix or whoever at the time.  He treats girls too well, Mike.  The perfect gentleman, he is, and he makes the rest of us look like fucking assholes with no feelings.  I attribute it to the wonder that is his mother and his older sister and his younger sister.  He was surrounded by women his whole life, so naturally they come naturally to him, if you get my drift.  It's doesn't hurt that he's one handsome mother-fucker as well.  What a jerk.  But hey, he's my best friend, I love him to death.  Other men should be so lucky to have a best friend like him, if for no other reason than to keep a grounded head on them.  He's every girl's dream.

That's definitely not me.

BsAs: Y Cafe Tortoni

God bless the Art Nouveau.  This place blankets itself upon thee.  Like a warm fur.  It's melted chocolate, it's café con leché, it's fresh churros for dipping, but really it's so much more.  It's the flowering wallpaper.  It's the checkerboard art from fine artists it collects with the sweet nectar that only these bees know.  This place is buzzing, and the noise, this irrefutable sound of living distorts and refracts and reflects off the old decorated glass on the ceiling and the grand mirrors and Tiffany lamps.  There's a glow in the air with the smell of espresso and rich chocolate and I can't understand a goddamn thing.  I fucking love it here.  I want to come here to write all day and let the old souls and phantoms lingering between the tables whisper something meaningful in my ear.  Thoughts of beauty and consequence and growth and immortality.  Grand schemes I could share with them, if only.  Hold themes and troubled dreams to talk through with the caffeine.  If only I understood the language.  In only I knew Spanish.

Muchas gracias, Cafe Tortoni.

BsAs: El Ateneo

"What are you doing?" she asks.  "With your hair?"

My fingers have found their way to my head yet again.  What fuck this is!  I fear I'll never quite get away from the habit, no matter how far I run from it.  Not even here in the south, Buenos Aires, not even here does my hair find solace.  No rest for the wicked, they say.  THere's pure treachery in my head then.  Where am I?

I'm in an old theater that's not an old theater anymore, but there was a time.  Maybe splendor, maybe magical performances graced this place years ago, but now it's a bookstore with a cafe on the stage and rows and rows of books where the audience used to be, and up on the high levels that I can see from here too.  The curtains are still red and the trim still gold and the angels and gods and cherubs are still dancing on the great domed ceiling above the orchestra pit, the kid's section.  Libros para niños.

But the magic's gone I think.  Only a residue of what was is left now, they way the cold damp night clings to tree leaves in the mornings.  That's if it's damp, and here in Buenos Aires there's always moisture in the air.

It rained blankets of water yesterday so that the cold soaked through my clothes on the way to the mystical flat on Ceretti for the Argentina v. Belgium game, and today's not much better.  There's not much rain, but the wind's kicking and a fine mist is whipping around and I can feel moisture between my toes.  This feels like Paris today.

"The weed loves this weather," Solange's friend had said yesterday.  Between the two quarterfinal games that day we managed to smoke even more.  From the vaporizer that I thought Solange had called a vibrator because it hums to life loudly every three minutes or so.  from the blunt, from the joint, always smoking in that house.  And mate with coca leaves.  After a hamburger, they took me upstairs under the greenhouse roof to show me the plants.  His plants, the farmer's the drummer's.

He grows OG Kush and Blue Dream and some pineapple hybrid from Hawaii.  And he plays death metal drums like a man possessed.  He's amazing.  "Ready for a relapse?" he'd say and pass me a joint of heavy indica.  It's strange to think that whatever I need here is provided for me.  I fall into place without even trying to, like the heavens want me to write some more.

BsAs: Vamos Argentina! 7'

The game's started right as I get onto the bus.  The 114, uno-uno-quatro.  It's already pouring too, and it's not light and misty, no, it's big heavy drops that drop plop on the brim of my hat, and splash off the shoulders of my coat as I'd waited on the corner for that damned colectivo.  Then ten blocks to Constituyentes where I stomped back off into the rain in my long coat and my bucket hat.

The coat was the coat from that warehouse New Year's Eve party in San Francisco on the pier, a long black trench made out of sleeping bag.  I'd thought the damned thing was water-proof, and still it might be, but even so, in that moment that I hopped off the bus and walked into that downpour again, I felt moisture, a wetness coming through the some of the seams on my back.  Stomping through the wet, everything wet.  It's a downpour sure, but I can feel the water hitting the skin on my face under the brim, like the water wasn't only falling down, but also falling up and side to side in this thick curtain air that I'm pushing through.  Slushing through in my new leather boots.  By myself.  The sidewalk is nearly empty, and suddenly there's honking from car horns in the street, and a man drives by with his windows rolling down, yelling "¡gol!"

So I run up the next block to a cafe door on the corner just in time to see the replay on the shitty box TV inside, bolted up in a corner between two old walls.  It's a beautiful volley from Higuain off a pass form di Maria.  Over an over again on the grainy screen, and all the old-timers smiling and hugging each other and women clapping, with me looking in at the door.  It's not even open, I just squint and peer through the fogging up glass.

They're only mid-cut and rubber-soled, these boots, but they keep my feet dry.  A gift from the Reef sales rep at the shop, thanks Steve.  I don't know what I'd do without them, if I only had Vans like I had in Paris.  Still, one puddle does me in.  Fuck, I gotta get to this place, I think to myself.  I'm on my way to meet Solange, the girl from Couchsurfing, and some of her friends.   My jacket's heavy with water, my hat's dripping wet when I come to a short brick building, 1855 Ceretti.  Solange answers the door, she's sweet.  She's a little older than me, a little older than Guada even, but she's young in the eyes, and she smiles like someone half her age.  She says, "Hola, Brian."

I say, "Hola, Solange," and follow her in, down a hall and right, into the high-ceilinged living room of a home.  It's not a flat, it a house.  On the couch there's two men sitting, one with dreads and a fresh face, the other a little bigger with a beard.  I feel young and alone, but I put that away somewhere quick and smile and hang my jacket on a peg over the heater and my hat too.  It's a big room, with lots of space around the couch and the coffee table littered with joints and cups and glasses and beer and mate and a bottle of seltzer water, and the flatscreen by the wall.  They're good people, we have a grand time, but no one else scores.

Then we drink yerba mate with coca leaves and smoke joints, and make cheeseburgers on the stove, and inspect the plants that the dreaded man has growing in his makeshift greenhouse upstairs.

BsAs: Los Calles de Buenos Aires

For some reason the streets here don't stay with me lie they did in Paris.  I can't remember any of the goddamn names.  For example, Guada's street is... Carlos San Ruiz?  Maybe?  That's probably wrong, and really, that's the only street I can think of.  [it's Carlos Antonio Lopez actually]

And still, here in Buenos Aires, three years later, I can still list off a handful of Parisian streets off the top of my head.  Rue Grenlle, Rue Didot, Rue d'Alesia, etc... and of course Rue Mahbourg.  That old top floor flat and the tiny windows.  Strange.  Maybe it's something that only comes in retrospect.

They're playing French music here in Helena's.  In Palermo Soho, and old crooning big band jazz too.  Louis Armstrong and dear Billie with the crackle on the trickle.  What warmth it brings to me.  It's different here.  The winter's not so cold, and the sex is on a well made platter with baby oil massages.  

I'm not sad here like I was in Paris.  I'm impatient.  I write more about men and less about women.  And I take the bus not the metro here.  Did they even have buses in Paris?  I can't remember.  I need to remember more streets here.  

I need to listen to more old jazz and come back to Helena's in Palermo.  Por favor.

I love writing here.
I love the big window with
The sun shining through.

BsAs: Tu Papa Y Mi Papa También

I met Guada's father today.  For breakfast, para desayuno let's say.  Con cafe au leché y tres fracturas. The coffee's bitter.  Good coffee though, just the bitter kind.  Y las fracturas, the sweet bread, like sugar croissants, they're good too.  And cheap as hell.  Twenty pesos for everything.

I'd seen the place the day before on the way back from Carrefour with a re-used plastic bag (they charge for bags, unlike the Chinese markets) of eggs and pasta and pasta sauce and one steak in hand, and I'd thought to myself, "Twenty pesos, not bad. No malo."

No, it wasn't bad at all.  Ricardo regaled me with stories in English while Guada worked on her laptop doing blogger things.  In his heart I saw it.  In his eyes really, more clearly like crystal beady balls of excitement and passion with his hands that would wave everywhere and now and again came down on the rickety table for a good shake, and Guada would get angry - or not angry no, but annoyed because her laptop would shake too and she would stop typing and look at him and say in Spanish, "Papa! No manos! Por favor!"  I didn't mind though.  If anything, I enjoyed the delivery.  The twinkle in his eye when he spoke.  Ricardo was a storyteller at heart, I think.  Or maybe it was just the coffee.

Either way, he smiled through it all as we exchanged cultural differences.  He told me of the one time, on his new motorcycle.  "No chain, transmission.  A Honda 900X," he said.  A big bike, and he ran a stoplight on the street on that thing only to see two police bikes waiting at the next one.  "Just smiling and laughing to each other, looking at me, with their bibs on ready to eat," he said.  When the next light turned green, they pulled him per of course, and he told them, "Let me go. I have money to bribe you , see? And I showed him," he said, "but I'm going to meet a girl at a tevas.  I've been working on her for three weeks and were finally going to shag, so I'll sign whatever I have to sign, ticket, whatever, just please let me go!"

"And the officer looked and said to me," he said, "he said, 'Don't stop for any lights now, just go. If anyone stops you, tell them I said it was all right, and just go! Go!"

"Vamos! Vamos!" I said in a fit, smiling.

"Si! And that's how it is here. Us men, if it is to shag we'll always help each other."  What a man.  He's been to jail.  He has a knife on him.  He spent time in the Foreign Legion, and I think he likes me, likes talking to me anyway, but he smiles true.  He's just hesitant because here I am, some foreign Yankee boy with a beard, and I'm staying with his daughter.  There's a very subtle protectiveness that I just only so pick up on.  I'm the sensitive type.  That's how I know he's a father.  And he simply loves to correct her.  He's a translator.  I think that's what I love most.

BsAs: Vamos Argentina 118'

The sky slowly clears over the fair city, the weathered buildings.  The rough city.  The gritty city.  But no matter how you see it, one cannot deny it's passion.  This isn't Paris.  This is more, think if Paris had open doors. Sans pretentiousness.  There's a beating heart in this place, like something out of the chest.  It's got more wrinkles in the face, this city Buenos Aires, but that's what makes it beautiful.  The cracks in the skin, the definition.  It's so lovely to look at, in every strange way, with every skinny building, the mind shoots up with the eyes into powder blue with white clouds slowly retreating into thin air.

This is victory.  A deafening roar, wild jumping and grabbing and pushing and shoving with pure joy, and everyone smiles or cries or chugs beer.  Replays of the pass play over and over, Messi to Di Maria in the final minutes of overtime.  Pockets of people pick up national futbol chants and songs and sing loud so that the music spreads at the tops of lungs.  It's victory for a whole nation, all Argentina, the exultation is palpable in the streets, in the bars, in the cafes, but most of all, in the park, where the match screams on a big screen, thirty feet high, at the bottom of the hill at Plaza San Martin.

BsAs: School's Out

The day's too nice for this thick jacket.  I'm on the bus again.  Siempre.  Should have worn the sport coat.  Mierde.  This shit is too bumpy, and this notebook to soft in the cover.  Just one more thing: I'm stuffed like a relleno pepper up in this bitch with school children.  High school.  Teenage girls and their familiar tone, even if I only understand a word or too.  Is it strange that I don't see them in the present?  Not who they are now, but who they will be in say, five years or so.  In their prime.  When they'll be attractive to me because now, right now they aren't.  Maybe pretty, yes.  Pero not attractive. They aren't ripe yet.  Like the oranges right now in San Isidro.