The Minutes Left Out of The Day

“In 24 hours, How could you change your mind?, she asked. In less than that, he replied. I’ve lied to you all about who I am and what I feel. I’m an untrained actor on a stage of life, a chameleon whirling through to get along, looking for an objective to fit my price, and worried at every other sight that I might have been wrong”.

He took his pants off at the Little Korean restaurant across from the mosque. Not the pants themselves, just the zippered  lengths afforded by the style he’d bought. The first time he wore these pants, he did the same to make it easy to get cool in the California heat. They walked the Buena Vista Park at the apex of the summer, and they worked in Paris at the end of summer, with the pervasive high heat and humidity the planet unleashed. Those pants worked for him in the two oases. Reflecting on his life, mostly his working life as opposed to the living life, and the amorous life, or the adventurous, the institutional, the cultural life and its peer seducing habitats, he fell into a clock induced syndrome of accounting for those patchwork moments that were as irreplaceable for learning as they were tolerable for living.

12:21 AM

The minutes of the day pass so fast here he is again there he is again, there he is again. It is once again Time to sleep, once again the time he cannot sleep, there is no sleep, just positive thinking, delete delete delete pauses in thinking.

Flash recall

Dirty Joe’s and the rub in the VW. It got old fast with all the nerdy beer drinking engineers. A few females rule the group, especially the attractive, daring and confident ones, who were outnumbered by the men. They had the time of their lives, more than one boyfriend, depending on whether it was a drunken incantation or a glimpse to the future. A tall Chicago electrical sat across the picnic table from him while the group downed pitchers of cheap shit beer. She rubbed her naked foot on his jean’s crotch to get his attention. He loved her directness, her height, her wicked smiled and her lovely breasts. For a moment, he was in love, but realized it was a drunken incantation, one he would pursue from time to time, in spite of her live-in boyfriend, who came home one night after studying to find him in a closet, where he hid after they. But no violence, no concern, he was able to walk away freely with a light conversation with the two of them. Some excuse about a t-shirt taken from the boat. How weird he thought at the time. How lucky he felt to not be beat up by a much bigger guy with psycho eyes and an alcohol abuse past.  

Amnesty international West Palm Beach or thereabouts, 1987. Ana from Arecibo took him to one of the meetings. He was more interested in exploring a relationship with her than writing letters to release prisoners of conscience. He could have let it happen following the night outside by the softball field, but he had things on his mind. The previous week a looney Deadhead tried to mentor him on LSD, and at that particular moment, he had no interest in that either. The kid overreacted and ceased being friends. Maybe there was something else on his mind.

Ana’s friend from the island wandered the mall and met an obedient German woman selling chocolate and nuts and other snacks at the mall candy store. He asked for her number and they met. She came to him. She wanted to serve him, but the fake red hair and thick panty hose were not his thing that night,  when he desired a petite Colombiana. He played around with her and got rid of her just to meet a friend for some weed and a surf punk tale. Ana had given up on him by then so they don’t see each other ever again until Facebook 20 years later and she asks what happened to all that hair. Upset, he let the conversation slow, pause and end.

Playing in the pool with a dark skinned Israeli with large breasts and a vigorous smile, years later, a moment in bed, it’s 1993. She was pretty, very pretty south Florida hippy Deadhead and Jewish. He loved her skin. Below the waist however, she was quite big. A bit more than he fancied. They flirted in that pool after his karate class on a hot summer day before he saw below the waterline. No one else there. She was pushing the limits and liked to flirt. He was horny but behaved. They would say hello from time to time. A few years went by and before he set off to leave south Florida forever, they had their time to weigh opportunity and consequences. She came to his bed and they made love. She had the look in her eyes of seeking love. He felt not much more than a temporary lust accomplishment, but felt bad afterwards. 

Brazilian Colombian mix up. The Japanese Brazilian was the girl he should have gone after. Instead he fucked it up. For the merengue concert in Miami where they packed in someone else's car for the hour long drive, he saw himself with the Japanese Brazilian, not beautiful but very attractive, and cool. But ended up rubbing his crotch against a pretty, skinny Colombian girl, dismissing the Brazilian. He ended up into a reactive relationship with a the Colombian girl who worked as a grocery check out girl and had no interest in studying further than high school. He lost the opportunity with the Brazilian; she was angry and didn't return his calls. He decided to continue to pursue the suntanned Colombian with long brown hair until he found out she was a virgin. She was also very jealous. He could encourage her to go to college. Her family loved him, even through Hurricane Andrew. He ended up fucking her once or twice and then had enough of the skit. She was immediately shocked with how he used her, and at how cold he was. He tried to reverse the move, feeling guilty. It was too late. But in the store where she no longer worked, her best friend, a fellow Puerto Rican with experience who always advised her, told him that she would never forget him, as he was the first and pushed her to get an education. 

Rolling through the same PR traffic lights on highway year after year...No forget that one. Nothing there yet. That doesn't change. 

Try Miami cocaine car wash Australian midnight oil fan and drunken night in Coral Gables and bayside. The weekend was for Midnight Oil. The Australian carried a lot of cash and a lot of coke. The Miami brothers were involved in a car wash business with the Aussie. He never made the connection but a large group of them ended up very drunk on a Bay of Miami boat, taking over the DJ, and dancing and making the crew very uncomfortable. They got off without getting arrested and saw Midnight Oil perform "Beds are Burning" at the Cameo. That Cameo served a lot of needs: Iggy Pop, Black Uhuru, Fela Kuti, and lots of Salsa souls.  

Fajardo hold up follow in 1994. He was on assignment, which was interesting because he could apply his knowledge and skills. At dinner with his boss, they were held up by four kids with masks and guns. He gave up his wallet, but still felt two things: 1) he could break their arms, and 2) he or someone else would be shot dead. They got away and for the first time he got that delayed, shaking feeling a few hours later after safely locked into the Carolina beach apartment. He helped himself to half a bottle of scotch that the owner left in the apartment, which he would replace. I’ve never seen a gun so close before, he kept thinking to himself.

Civil Servant x Poet x Martial Artist = Procrastinator

Here are The Fears.

Physical assault and violence.  Sickness and dying. Being alone. Rejection or pity. Perceived weakness. Sacrifice with no dividends (hard work and no pay, or not enough pay). Embarrassing, uncomfortable moments. Undefined, unrecognizable fear (or anxiety attacks and bad dreams).

Life could be a relentless cycle of returning episodes from sun up to sun down.

The last one - Undefined, unrecognizable fear - worries him the most, from what I can see. He’s been talking to me endlessly about all these moments in his life, his work, about family and friends, and even about strangers and random occasions and for unexplainable reasons. I might understand him to a level, but he worries me sometimes. On the whole, he might be headed in the wrong direction. He takes in the air so seriously, it could poison him by his own volition. Others, it may seem, breathe without candor, yet smilingly survive. How I can teach him to take those matters elsewhere into his cranium-septum-rectum, without bolding the spirit of a mad warrior, an adolescent anger seething within?

Doing the Math.

This Man In the City, muttering to himself. I’m watching curiously, and slowly regarding it a worthwhile endeavor, I crack a hole in his head and peek within. His mindset smacks a bit Shakespearean, Victorian, Buddhist, or even Confucian. If that makes sense. An echo inside reverberates, horribly difficult to translate, so I put it through software:

Nothing too spicy. Not a spy, see?

Or a hitherto superhero.

Only a drop of the egotistical practical purist, with a momentary sense of mission, purposefully but not dangerous.

Obsessed with some uninvited tea party already in history.

He seems Unclear about some moral objective in his story, which lacks puritanical or pure tyrannical perversion.

Or love. I can’t truthfully tell which.

Confused but struck by the enigma, I pull out a book on the subject of Convenient Thought. This essence might be defined by mathematics, if theories hold, although it must be simple enough as arithmetic in order to tell the story (in the partial differential version, many variables go to zero or are assumed to be unity, per my ye old professor of Dynamics and Fluid Theory):

Man = (public servant x (feigned) poet x (retired) martial artist ) x procrastination factor n-1/ (love * adventure + doom).

The denominator gets a little fuzzy, so we’re not sure about these operations yet.

So, yes, this is an estimate.

Without getting into fractals, the function can be drawn somewhat like this:

C = f(P, B, L)

where C = a civil servants dedication, however it is often confused with Service or Sense of Mission.

P = poetic attempts or purpose in prose, and nothing to do with Scale.

B = a descending logarithmic scale from his time as a Budoka, already >10 years.

L = his prowess as a lover, also decreasing, however L is also a function of Passion, which makes appearances and has predictable behavior over time that has not been deduced. So it is not deducted yet either, and therefore is still not accepted practice in Actuarial Science.

with PFn-1 approaching infinity as n = the number of new ideas that pass into his head when in motion (usually walking, rolling, running, swimming, flying or biking, but never in front of paper or a keyboard).

I have yet to find a panel that can acknowledge, accept or discredit these postulations.

All He Asked For in a Film

He was alright before the 80’s

His music didn’t stink

But he didn’t have the catch of Springsteen

Even though he looked the part

Falling into a time machine

Everything became clear

He would play the songs of successful writers

Years before their time

and take all the credit

Suddenly people from a Yoga class

With the teacher praying all over them in the desert

She was beckoning a little

In the heat, and naked

She asked directions in Czech

The American dream re-imagined

He awoke suddenly, embarrassed from having shared that dream

looking back at previous sentences here

and realizing, few made sense

how would anyone be able to follow

and project their void?

But when he awoke in needles and shivers

the girl he knew as “I Need a Limb” was actually Anita Lim,

she was sick and her disease crushed one side of her body

naked and unashamed of being exposed

all the people around her watched her sickness

bones sticking out of her sockets

hips, extra sharp

shorter on one side than the other

and her boyfriend tending to her last moments

He was shocked by such a dream

He wanted to call her and see if she was really alright

however there was the fear that, because she was so young

and because they were not close anymore

that all this inquiring and confessing to this mania

would only drive her further away

So he sat and thought about “A film with her in it”

about her, about following her around

asking her questions

like the ones probably being asked of their last date

when they watched a film at home

it might be enough to salvage the thought

For a moment he forgot about her

and remembered again the night he sat down

not really dismembered

or sad in faith

but accidentally opening and reading the thoughts he'd expressed

a few stanzas before

His day in New York

seemed quintessentially real

last night, while eating Thai food in Chelsea

the transvestite at the neighboring table

took a dislike to him

she insulted him in Spanish more than once, as if he could not understand

finally he spoke back

she then laid into him, left and right

as if waiting to ambush him

there he was, suit and tie, chopsticks in hand

appearing belligerent, rude and threatening

why should he, white meat,

get offended by an angry pretty girl with a man's voice?

This morning he heard the answer, as he rode his bike into the subway against the commute

He leaned the bike up against the pole inside the car,

and sat on the empty orange seats of the N line

it felt wet

He looked up, no dripping condensation from above

He smelled his hand and inhaled the piss of many, many a homeless, many angry, many forgotten, many of gender unknown.

Searching for Anonymity

He prefers a shadow to spotlight. 

He often likes to be alone but does like the crowds.

Being deemed insignificant. Cannot be noticed. 

He feels a small amount of paranoia when more than one stranger has noticed him.

Fear of being bothered with having to give explanations about who he is, why here, where going. 

There is also an innate, paranoid fear of being assaulted, or even arrested. As the wrong guy of course. This feeling could happen anywhere in Middle America or the middle of Africa, in a small town, suburb or out in the country, in a poor village or a decrepit city.

Prior to leaving for Lusaka, he purchased several items of clothing for different purposes. He wanted to be dressed for field work in the dusty agricultural and industrial areas he was to visit, and wanted to play down any form of luxury while in the city. But he also wanted to be ready for any potential business development meetings for future work, since his assignment in Africa would only be six to nine months, and he would need to find his future from there. So he went shopping in a few department stores and in an Army/Navy store. He also needed clothes for working out, so that he would not get so out of shape by sitting in a hotel room typing away and putting away all that beer, wine and scotch that would be consumed in the hotel bar.

For exercise, he used a gym in the hotel, if it had one. Or he ran outside while exploring the neighborhood surrounding the hotel where, in a safe manner. As a runner back then, he could move quickly through Lusaka neighborhoods largely unnoticed - or so he thought. That would be American thinking. He would always be noticed. A friend who once lived in Paris told him that Americans were always noticed jogging in Paris principally because they were jogging, especially early in the morning, often with baggy sweats, rather than the French or other Europeans, who would be dressed in the latest tight fitting, shiny athletic gear. Later, Americans caught on. And now no one can be seen exercising without Nike approved fashion.

But Zambia in 1995 or any other year was neither America nor France. It was and is, southern Africa. He would be noticed no matter what was worn. It became immediately obvious that any new and trendy fashion would stick out, with American or European, and unless he had the right 4 x 4 and attitude, accent and ability to speak local languages, he was not going to be confused with a white-descended African.

Although he wore old t-shirts and shorts to put off any notion of wealth, to almost anyone living in Lusaka or elsewhere in Zambia, wealth was relative in comparison. He could be sweaty coming back from a run and the prostitutes in the hotel would still follow him if the security guards did not stop them. 

Before leaving the States, he had purchased a pair of black running shoes, thinking that they would not appear so dirty as quickly. Zambians had not seen these black sneakers yet. Everywhere he went, the men and boys stared at the shoes as if they had rockets attached to them.

Running did not reduce his visibility or anonymity. People just didn’t run very much, especially foreigners. Maybe local distance runners training as athletes could be seen running, but they would be in a track, well identified. They would not be a  white man with an an un-athletic body running in shabby rags around the diplomatic neighborhood and government center. Neither did many of the foreigners walk around much. They were always driving around in 4x4’s or cars or being driven. So instead of being left alone while running or walking, taxis followed him and tried to solicit my business, “no need to run, my friend, I will take you”, “where are you going, boss, get in?”, “it’s too hot for you Mister, I have a comfortable car, which hotel do you stay?”.

He rarely took a taxi except when he went to the Lusaka jazz club. He would walk out there when the sun was still out, and come back a bit drunk after drinking local beer and dancing and sweating with the local girls. He would get away alone and would jump into a taxi, sometimes finding the driver just as drunk as him or passed out.

When he returned to the States, he got what he needed in New York. So many people who couldn't care less me and he loved it. It was the mid-90’s.

Years later he still doesn't like being noticed on his Brooklyn balcony.

Morning in Istanbul

I.

In the morning
             I feel defenseless
             my dreams have already
colored and cubed my future day

If my body
             could stretch thin
             I would touch the tip
of my toes,
and yearn for grasping
                       releasing

                       helping
                       assisting fingers

did Zoë's veins reign me in
and run away with my skin?
Or shake away the fear
             of slaughtered lambs
             shaking hands
             paws' errands
yes, there are cats in this land
a silly tourist hardly has time to reflect
and still unsure how much suffering
awards merit

II.

Mornings for me were made difficult, alone
I will ask the ceiling to politely
             cover my feet
             request my thinking cap to
             turn down the volume
                       allow fresh air to blow through
                       inspire                         respire
                       deep breaths and no one there...
no thoughts...or thoughts about how nothing lasts
isn't that what they teach?

III.

Mornings without chemical therapy seem infinite
             childlike mornings
                       unsure of consequences
                                 hollow predictions of events to follow
                                           even as dysentery mysteries continue unabated
                                           say morning papers, for adults to escape pleasure
                                 ridiculous rules are not disengaged
                       waiting for mom and dad in the rain
             to show me the way

IV.
hybrid technologists intent on scaring
me away
             from living in the past
             from using pen and paper
even the keyboards that won't last
why should I among the thousands matter?
When all that changes is the world's green blood
             shame and chains
                       telemarketing and games
and it all amounts to fame?

V.
Fingers needed
             to pull me through the day
Irritated
injured shoulders trade places
             rotating
             gyrating about my head
where are those rescuing hands
I was promised?

VI.
Cold sun rains hard unannounced
I prefer the hot winterly gray
             threatening to freeze my toes
             but hands to warm them, not mine
Because I haven't learned to stretch so thin

Para un Junkie Anónimo

Te dejaré Te dejaré,
Te desaparecerás de mi memoria
no por gusto, si no por fín,
que se acabó toda tu gloria

Si pudiera te aguantaría
y te daría mil golpes a la cabeza
pero estás sumergido en arena movediza
te daría una mano con ciega fé
pero no quiero que me la arranques también

Leo tu nombre en mi libro de direcciones
veo la cara envejecida y cortada por ladrones
solo tu solo puedes curarla
pero si no sabes tu propio nombre
Tu sólo volverás a la tierra

Quizás un día me daré por verte
si prometes que buscarás lo que quieres
temo que la esperanza por ti se acaba
y no para de entrar el líquido ajeno que corre por tus venas