Supposing Truth Is A Woman

- what then? [her name is probably Emily]

If I suppose so, the reason is clear, the reason why, for this treason in my mind towards every other poor city on this green Earth.  The Truth is what keeps me coming back to the warm, light ocean breeze burnt skin LA, galloping back from southern hemisphere winters and Latin gems of an old city feel that I love.

It's not the buildings that bring me back.  Not even the weather or the waves.  It's the faces and smiles and spliffs, the Truth - truths, all of them, city wide; the friends and the comfort of hame that makes it impossible for me to live anywhere else.  I don't know where I'd be if it were not for those Pytka girls.

The old cozy beach house, right on the sand in Venice.  I wouldn't be writing here now without it I don't think.  It's Monday, nearly 9:00am.  I'd probably be in an office right now if it wasn't for those two.  Sweet Sacha, and dear Arielle, they saved me.  They shined a light for me away from the grind, saved me from certainty and the security of a real life with real things like a real job and real money.  From a future that was clear, they changed me so that the simple relief of ocean breeze on a rail of a third floor terrace in the sun brings me peace.  Eyes close for a second so all that fills my head is the banter sound of beautiful women and curious men on a summer Sunday, and the music, the taste of watermelon and salsa, and tequila limeade and bummed cigarettes on my throat and my tongue, and the intangible feeling of joy from being back home.

From the Frills of Winter

I had a nice spliff head-buzz when I saw her running by in the Spring.  I remembered her face and especially her form from the good romp at Tampico, in the winter months.  Mikey's Santa Cruz DJ debut.

He was good, Mikey.  By which I mean to say he was good at music, not just DJ-ing.  His hit single from high school, "Shake ya dicks," still to this day brings tears to my eyes.  To be blunt, it was a gut-busting time.

The crowd at Tampico was entirely girls with the exception of Matty Mike and I.  And Matty kind of looks like a girl already, so really it was just Mikey and me.  And all girls.  Katie's friends.  All girls, both Mikeys, a Matty and me.  Her name was Brittany.

One of two Brittanys.  Because there were two Brittanys there that drunken night.  One latin and blonde hair, she was thin in a tight blue dress, with a sexy way about her.  She had nice lips and a skinny little booty.   One bright eyes and tight lips, with hips, she was every one of my dreams.

She had good running form.  That says a lot about a lady.  She spoke soft, and for dramatic effect, always waited just a half-second longer than normal to respond.  And sometimes she didn't respond at all, just smiled with a cringe and desire at my chest before I grabbed her.

I remember seeing her from our ground floor porch, looking out across the long grass at Grandview.  She was just rounding the soft corner where the road bends around to the right towards the 1 and West Cliff.  I was high and decided to jump on my bike after her.  It was the way she ran, the figure she cut in the winter sunlight.  I caught up and slowed down beside her, and gave her the old double-take.  "You're Katie's friend.  From Tampico."

"You're Mikey's roommate."  Just a glance at me.  She kept running, and panting, and her skin glistened in the brisk air.  "Where you biking to?"

"Checking the surf.  Where are you running to?"

"To Kelly's."

"That's funny.  I work there."

There's a sparkle in her eye, and she smiled.  "Oh you do, do you," she said, slowing her pace, taking stock of me.  "So you can get me bread then."

"I would love to get you bread," I said.  "Right when they close I can grab some.  What's your number."

She gave me her number like that.  Girls love a boy in a bakery, I guess.


[to be continued]

BsAs: Nabokov

"I was weeping again, drunk on an impossible past."

And just like that everything's all right and clear again.  It's the airplane radio, jazz.  Armstrong, La Vie en Rose, on cue.  There's a flash, as there always is, to way back, simple puppy love at chez Sacha all those years ago, watching Marion Cotillard before I'd ever her name before; before like, before this, before travel and writing, before photography and college and all the ups and downs, before Laura even.  Jesus, before Laura.  What was I before then?  Before Mammoth?  What was I?  Who was I?

I was every girl's best friend.

What is that?  What curse?  That word comes to me more and more these days, I feel it, this something that follows me, like a veiled shadow, not strong, not a weight necessarily, secretly following in the sunlight through winter trees splattered on the ground; no outline, awash and moving and swaying in the wind with the dead branches.

Si, the curse is light, I think.  It's what it bring me that weighs heavy.  A lonesome heart, and like the football side of it, I'm given witness to great sights, awesome masses, magnificent expectation, proximity to what could be something truly joyous - a grand celebration that never comes.  It's always taken away at the last minute, the last minutes, but leads on to the very end, like all the women in my life.

I can never quite hold on long enough.
Neither could Holland in 2010.
Nor Argentina now, on this sabbatical.

I have a kinship with never quite being good enough.  I know how it feels, Messi.  It's how my entire life seems to be playing out; nil-nil 'til the very end, and then some lucky soul comes pulls the rug out, and I'm left standing there dazed, middle of the pitch without having a clue as to what happened. Always thinking I could've done more, I should've.  I could've done things differently, a thousand different ways, but I didn't.  And now here I am, runner-up.  On the world stage.

It plays again.
(short loop)

That's how music is right?  Hour long album, tops.  Playlist, album, mix-tape, whatever.  I'm watching Almost Famous on the last leg back to LA, back to reality, and the sunny end to this stoic winter dream in the South.  This movie makes me feel whole again, and young like everything used to be and nothing's changed.

They got free Johnnie Walker up here.  Yeah, it's grand and the joy swells inside me.  I want to see Savanna, my Penny Lane.

Cheesy right?  I hope Jordan's at the airport, I hope Claire takes me back.

"So Russell, what do you love about music."

"Well, to begin with... everything."

BsAs: In Winter

It always feels like something's missing.  I missed a lot this winter, in this Winter Sur.  I missed the summer, skipped it's summer mood.  I missed my best friend's birthday, the 4th of July, always spend it did I in the throws of drink and good company and familiarity at the sense that things would always be like that.  What's that called... that revel in the wonderful routine, the commonplace, the expected and afforded to plan.  It's a submission to comfortable surroundings; a stunt to growth.

Who says how much we are to grow?  Well, I guess we each do, each of us.  There's not much amusement in growth (we all remember how much schooling sucked), so I understand the thinking; grow enough, grow into something, into a place and enjoy it.  Growing's no walk in the park, but it provides wonder and the awe of learning.

Or whatever, you know?

Maybe you can grow too much, get too big you know, like the Roman Empire or Alexander the Great and his Greece.  It was really much more than Greece really, but it all came crashing down afterwards.  Is that what happens?  A big explosion, an expansion out into greatness and then cracks in the shield under the weight and then turmoil, disillusionment and chaos.

Or is growth like a redwood tree, steady and strong, and stronger and taller still, slowly each year for eons.  But nobody knows your name.

That's right, I missed Outside Lands too, speaking of Northern evergreens.  Outside Lands and San O, and practically all the summer pier concerts.

All for an exploration of self-imposed depression.  In a fucking beautiful city in its winter rest.  It's death.

I feel like the hardboiled egg, not the coffee bean right now.  At least I'm not the carrot.  Let's see if we can turn that hot water into coffee, shall we?

What I learned is this: there is no escape in running away.  Escape is in the music.  Escape is the music.  No, reverse that.

Never go deaf, my darling.

BsAs: Dreams of Californication

I'm spending my last day decidedly on the train.  The bumpy ride to Retiro, the heavy swaying.  Ironically, there's a trio wrapped in casual French to my right, across the aisle.  Just like Paris.  I'm sitting just by the coupling, and when I look down I can see the tracks through the gap between the cars, trotting by on squeals and the iron nail on chalkboard sound of metal against metal that's become somewhat of a soothing sound in the vacuum left by real music to my ears.  It's the sound of worlds colliding in my mind.

Paris, Bali, California.  This city, Buenos Aires.  The lot, all blending together like all the colors of things down the drain.  What's lasting is a light cool azul to the eyes before it's washed away by the cleansing water of imminent air travel.  Recycled air and changing time-zones.  I'd told Ricardo that the noise, the city sounds, screeched drawn out duldrum, bells and horns and sirens and the sounds of cars and buses and thousands of people talking and thinking to themselves.  all reflected off the high city walled near Palermo.  The sound at 5:00 rushed hours in central neighborhoods, think sidewalks and coffee.  I told him that these are the things, the sounds with eyes on the buildings above, these are the what, the mysterious key to put my restless mind at ease.

Maybe I was just trying to be poetic.  To impress.  But I think it's true.  That static white noise does something to drop thought, the way I always wish for when the thinks' too much.  It's desperate insanity (or let's say for the sake of my mental well being, for some semblance of sanity, that's right, that it's malignant genius) that seeks static backgrounds and loss of thought for nothing if but a few seconds, maybe a minute.

When I look back down at the streets, I already know what I'm going to miss the most.  The women.  The female landscape of this city.  Italian and Spanish descendants make beautiful foot-traffic, especially when everybody walks.  It makes me want to move to a walking city.  Something spread out like Paris.  Maybe New York.  Not San Francisco though, the city's too small and the public transit too on point to really put the miles in like they do here.  For me Buenos Aires is a city of great legs.

And good food too.  Last meals now.  Last supper perhaps, but early, 'round lunchtime.  I was thinking about some asado, but I panicked and just ordered the Plato del Dia.  Two thick milanesas, thick breaded patties and rice that seemed to be marinating in butter.  The rice was rich yellow, the pollo, juicy.  It was fucking delicious.  In a bare-bones simplistic sort of way.  Just my style.  Something heavy to hold me over 'til California.

In Memoriam

For him, life wasn't so much
important as living was.
Because when you've lived,
really lived, like he did, what's
life without the living.  Wasted
time maybe.  It takes a brave
man to make that choice.  Yeah
sure, any idiot coward can kill
himself.  But for a thinking man,
like him, there's a whole lot
riding on both sides.  It ain't so
black and white.  He preferred
the road unknown.  I feel ya,
Robin.

Charles Bukowski: Safe

BsAs: For Guada

She wanted me to write something about Buenos Aires.

That's all she asked of me, and a part of me wishes she'd been a bit more specific because I don't know exactly what to write.  The best I can do is tell you what Buenos Aires is to me.  For that, I need to say why I'm here.  I came here to write.  I always go places to write - I went to write in Paris and I went to write in Bali - but never about where I am, more of where I've been.  I went to Paris to write about traveling around Europe.  I went to Bali to write about living in Paris, and I came here to write about winter.  Not here, but in California.  That was the plan.

Let me say this: I don't think I leave my home to travel anymore.  I did that once, after university, I backpacked around Europe, the same old that everyone does.  Trains and backpacks and a handful of days in each city.  I don't do that anymore.  Everyone travels.  There's nothing really truly unique about it, not that I'm trying to find something unique, it's just not what I want.  I don't want to sight-see, I've done that, and I've seen that, and I wanted to see something new.  I want to know what it's like to live in a city that's not my own.  I want somewhere new to become routine.  I stayed in Paris for two months, and Bali too, and I've been here in Buenos Aires for fifty days.  Sure, I know a pair of months is hardly enough to call a place home, but it's all I can afford for myself, I don't have a lot of money, and what I've learned from flying to these different places is that it takes about a month for a city to become routine.  To feel comfortable.  I guess I do it all for the backdrop now.

So what is Buenos Aires.  To me, a man from Los Angeles with no spanish tongue?  I can certainly say with authority in my mind that it's marvelous.  It's Paris with a twist and more grit.  It's a sprawl, sprawling enough so that one needs to get a solid hold on the bus system to really know it, so it's kind of like LA too, but with a different passion and landscape and much more color and flowering and decoration (I really do enjoy the look of the buses here), and a sense of the past that I always love to see in a city.  The old buildings and the bronze in the parks.  San Telmo and Retiro and Recoleta, and even parts of Palermo.  Clogged sidewalks and subways like New York.  Brickwork and stone like London.  In short, Buenos Aires is every city in the world, and at the same time its own little crystalline gemstone.  The skyscape of tall skinny buildings, flats stacked on flats next to nothing, and  then nothing, and then another stack.  A good view of the city makes the eyes dance more than any city I know, and it's immediately recognizable and wonderful and makes me never want to sit still, but always be on the move, on my feet, exploring.  I'm a walker, and this city's made for it, and I love it.

Through the weekend markets, past the midnight milongas, all of it, and the colors and graffiti and, my god, the beautiful women that breathe life into the city concrete and the thick humid air.  There's something about Argentine girls that, more than anything else, make me wish desperately that I spoke even passable spanish so that I could talk to them.  I wish I knew tango so that I could dance with them at night and hold them close.  They've got more fire than Parisians, more spark, like a wild flame, burst of fireworks compared to a cold french cigarette.  Women made for bright love and smoldering passion in a certain disparity not unlike my own.  We're akin, me and this city, and there's a feeling in me that I must return one day.  Under any pretext or context or circumstance, and with a solid grasp of the Spanish language.  If not for the women, at least for the meat cooked over hot coals.  Take a metaphor out of that for me please.  Something beautiful and sexual.  Like this city.

Oscar Wilde: The Importance of Being Ernest

"I keep a diary in order to enter the wonderful secrets of my life.  If I didn't write them down, I should probably forget all about them."

"Llevo un diario para registrar los maravillosos secretos de ma vida.  Si no los anotara, problemente lo olvidaria todo acerca de ellos."





After all, that's my greatest fear.  The thought that I might have forgotten something.  That's why I write it all down, everything I think should remember anyways.  Like the pentagram.  Guide's star on her forehead for protection.  When she feels like she needs it, when she feels a spirit or an energy and she doesn't feel safe.

She reminds me of Lennon.

Oscar Wilde: A Woman Of No Importance

"My dear young lady, there is a great deal of truth, I dare say, in what you said, and you looked very pretty while you said it, which is much more important."

"Mi querida señorita, había mucha verdad, creo, en lo que decíais, y estabais muy bonita mientras lo decíais, lo cual es mucho más importante."





No, I was mistaken before.  This is Buenos Aires.  This place, San Telmo.  Not Villa Urquiza, not Retiro...  Not Palermo, not Barrio Chino, not Porto Madero, not even La Boca, but this place.  San Telmo.  The old heart through which all the city's blood flows through.  It's pumping here in San Telmo.  Always.  And at all hours and late into the night.

It's by chance that I come upon these small enlightenments and maybe some could say, "Well, of course it is, everyone knows that.  I didn't need you to tell me.  I read it on the Internet.  I know.  That's no great enlightenment."

And they wouldn't be wrong.  Not entirely.  But I said nothing about some grand enlightenment.  Some monstrous clairvoyant clarity.  I said it was a something small.  A subtle thing.  A thing twenty-watt bulb turned on, recessed lighting.  An open eye blinking to see everything in focus.  It's no atom bomb.

But if you haven't lived here, if you've just passed through for a day or two or a week in this city, I don't think you do know really.  Maybe you know the Sunday markets and the outdoor tango and the street food and the meat and the ice cream and the antiques, and you say, "This place is bustling! It's so alive!"

That's like praising good taxidermy.  It's just the skin of the morcilla, as I think I'm now going to start saying.  Morcilla is that smooth dark sleek blood sausage.  It's tight and refined and served nice.  The inside's not so clean cut.  It doesn't slice like chorizo.  When you cut through, no matter how smooth, morcilla explodes.  Into everything.  Coagulated blood like guts, and spices, and anything else thrown in.  The flavor's strong.  It's absolutely delicious.

It was a Thursday that I arrived at Andrea's.  A gracious host, she had a pullout bed under her's.  She asked me if I wanted to go out for the night.

I was tired, but I obliged.  After all, I'd been here a month and hadn't really gone out yet, not at night, so why not.  "Sure, why not," I said.

"Have you seen any tango yet?"

"Yeah, sure.  They were dancing in the streets on Sunday."

She gave me a look like, "really, bitch?" and said, "I have a surprise for you.  Tonight's going to be a fantastic night.  And you can bring your camera if you like."

So I did.  After the rest of Solange's joint, of course.  Andrea split it with me, and then she took me to a milonga around 23:00.

You know you can't hear a heart in the day light.  No, outside in the sunshine everything's much too loud to hear something as soft as a heartbeat.  Too many cars really.  Nights are lighter on traffic.  Weeknights even more, and the later the better.  That's when you hear the heart pounding.  And to be honest you usually don't hear it so much even then.  Not as much as you feel it.

A milonga is a tango bar, and if there's ever a time to feel a heartbeat, it's in a place like that.  The beat's in the footwork and the passion in the face and the embrace.  It's in the heat of the mild winter and the humidity that grips the floors and the tables and crevasses and the seats and the very skin of the place, the old walls, the wet mirrors and the seltzer water.  It's draped on all the cobblestones outside so that the lights reflect a glow off the street and my hands feel damp.

All the girls move like scorpions.
I knew a scorpion once.

Blonde hair, fair skin, and blue eyes.
It wasn't the way she moved so much that made her a scorpion though.  It was the way she pricked you with the sting in her words, or more the way she used them.  With the stinger in, she had an unnerving gift of being able to get whatever she wanted.  It was her eyes, I think.  The way they balanced over the top end of her button nose and her smile.

Oscar Wilde: An Ideal Husband

"Los hombres pueden ser analizados, las mujeres meramente adoradas."

"Men can be analyzed, women... merely adored"

Here's a wild thought.  What if I wrote this book in Buenos Aires.  This story of winter.  Sure, I realize that was the whole point of this excursion, to squeeze this out of me, this awfulness.  I get that.  What I'm saying is what if I wrote this in the present, not the past like I planned.  Well, in the past too.  Mostly, in fact.  But so that they knew I wrote it here.  In this city.  A California cowboy story written in the true South, way south, Latin south.  So they know what I know now, right alongside what I thought I knew then.  All mashed up.

No, not mashed up.  I already did that.  Back when I didn't know a damned thing, and I thought I knew it all, and I was miserable, living on a mattress in a living room, working at a bakery, and telling myself that this whole writing business can't really be that bad.  Back when I used to love writing, before I knew how everyone died.  I thought it was the bee's knees and that I was some renegade literary rockstar type like Hank Moody or Kerouac.  I'd just get high, write a book and be famous.

That's always the way dreams go though, isn't it.  Most times they're just too good to be true.  They aren't realistic.  It took the truth crashing down on me to get that.  Matter a fact, it's always crashing on down.  And look at me now.  Writing has become the agony of my life.  Because of what happened in Santa Cruz and Paris and LA that year, and all the places in between, before, after and what's always happening to me.

I'm shitting letters into pages on the goddamn train to Retiro right now.  I mean, who does that?  A crazy person does that.  A bearded crazy person in second-hand clothes.  Lucky I have good tastes in thrift stores and a sharp eye at passing yard sales back home.  The stylish lunatic, these Porteños must be thinking as they chance glances at me.  "Where's he from with that beard? And what the hell is he doing here?"

It's all Callie's fault really.  And Max's too, for telling me I could do anything.  I can't even feel the pain in my writing hand anymore.  We're here now.

[to be continued]

Oscar Wilde: Vera, or The Nihilist

"La indifferencia es la vengaza que el mundo se toma sobre los mediocres."

"Indifference is the revenge the world takes on mediocrities."





Mediocrity is the best metaphor.  Like shoes meaning to be something else.  Callie gave me a pair of shoes from her past, a little more worn, in Santa Cruz when she moved in and I loved her, and it wrecked me.  My shoes weren't built to last long in that, especially biking to work everyday.  I wear boots now, things built to last.  They're leather (and they were free, thanks Steve!), if they break I'll just fix them.  Guide has a lot of shoes though.  I gave her a book when I came.

She hasn't read it yet, but she keeps telling me she will.  I don't know why I took that copy of A Mid-Summer's Daydream off my computer.  I should've had it with me down here.  To give to people.  That would've been so easy.  But, alas!  I'll just have to wait until next time.  Never leave that behind!

[to be continued]

I never fucked Callie though.  Wow, I can't believe that.  Well now, come to think of it, I never fucked Laura either.  I had just fallen in love with them.  Guada doesn't quite have the same shoes that I had back in those Santa Cruz days.  She's older and wiser than that (I hope).  At least she's getting some pleasure out of it.

It was a crushing yolk for me.  Cold sweats at night, tight jaw, grinding teeth.  It drove me crazy.  Low, depressed, suicidal dazed crazy some days.  I tried to write those days, but usually ended up editing pictures, smoking weed, drinking Port, and watching Netflix.  Goddamn Californication.

[stop]

Look what you've done to me David Duchovny.  I'm in of all places Argentina without a lick of Spanish to my name.  Well, at least now I know somethings.  It's better than my French perhaps, and I studied French for three years.  I guess maybe that helped with the Spanish lessons from Guada.

Monsieur Ebiner, that wiley Swissman, this is all his fault.  He was too good a language teacher, and now here I am in Buenos Aires thinking it's just that easy.  Just pick it up and go.  Then the reality of Madame Kane came along.  She was my language teacher after Mr. Ebiner, for my sophomore and junior year (and I didn't take language as a senior).

Still, Buenos Aires is a mute city for me without language.  And without music either!  Or headphones at least.  The language of the people and all the sounds of the city fill my ears with the same legibility.  It's all music to me now.

You become aware of a lot of little details when you can't understand anything.  The mundane, the everyday stuff.  Like the man riding the train all day, same seat, same train, four hours apart.

I went sign shopping near Retiro.

[to be continued]