“Okay.” He was back. “Write this down. L.A. River. I’m checking out the transvestite camp along there. We get a wall of rain. And I mean a wall of rain. Flood conditions. Dumps a whole foot in five minutes. I timed it, so you know I know. Shit floating down the river. Car parts, hypodermics, dead dogs, Neanderthal bones, props from the last movie shot down there, you name it. Folks in the bridge rafters tossing avocados and screaming. Got a cross-dresser who was doing his regular laying around, near drowned with his wig on. Had to pull him out and pump the lungs. Brother saw God. It was like a baptism. Then it was all gone. Concrete bed’s dry. My pants’re dry. Like it never happened. And you look up. The sun’s up. I mean up. Like it’s never gonna go away. And by my synchronization, it’s near going on seventeen hundred. Daylight saving my ass. This is like Alaska.”
A flash-flood-L.A.-river-transvestite-drowning story with a happy ending. I thought about it. “What else you got?”
“What else I got? Balboa, you always saying, what else you got? I know you’re producing pulp. I even read it from time to time. Not that it isn’t good pulp. Who else but Balboa’s gonna write about us? But around here, brother, we recycling your pulp as beds. Maybe you can turn the stuff back into trees and build us some real beds.”
“I’m trying, Buzz. I really am trying.”
“Hey, I know what I was gonna tell you. Yeah.” Buzzworm’s pause was pregnant. “This one is good. Real human interest. But he’s shy. Been around a while now, but moves around a lot. The easy thing is he only moves around the freeway system.”
“Freeway system’s big, Buzz.”
“Yeah, but you can’t miss him. Picks an overpass, see. Looks out over the traffic, the freeway, and—” I could sense Buzzworm making gestures through the phone, “conducts.”
“Conducts?”
“Music. With a baton and all. You know. Like Leonard Bernstein. Like Esa-Pekka Solanen. Conducts.”
“Conducts what?”
“I could get philosophical with you man, but so what if he’s crazy. We all crazy!”
“He was a conductor?” I scratched my head.
“Is Seiji Ozawa still around?”
“I think so.”
“Then it’s not him,” Buzzworm confirmed.
“He’s Japanese?”
“Probably an American breed. Hey, you downtown. You never see him? Thought by now somebody’d see him. You too busy on the car phone, man. Don’t bother to look up and see the sights.”
“I don’t have a car phone.”
“Ever notice the Washingtonia Robustas?”
“Buzz. The story. Give me the story.”
“Hey, I read this story where a writer and a palm tree face it off. Wouldn’t you know it, the palm tree wins.”
“I don’t have all day, Buzz.”
“Okay. So, I offered him mental health services. He just laughed. Maybe he’s schizo, but maybe not. They can fool you good. Totally lucid. And somebody takes care of him. He’s out on the streets, but he’s got a stash somewhere keeps coming to him. Come winter, he’s got a jacket. Come summer, he’s got a hat.”
“So what’s the angle?”
“I gotta write the story for you, Balboa? Look him up. See for yourself. You wanna humanize the homeless? Then humanize the homeless.”
“Don’t be sarcastic.”
“It’s a wake-up call, Balboa. All these people living in their cars. The cars living in garages. The garages living inside guarded walls. You dump the people outta the cars, and you left with things living inside things. Meantime people going through the garbage at McDonald’s looking for a crust of bread and leftover fries.”
“Can I quote you?”
“Weren’t for the deal, you could go to hell.”
“Don’t count on any deal, Buzz. I made a promise to you. That’s all.”
I felt myself squirming. Buzzworm had a stake in my stories, deeper and hungrier than that of the most competitive reporter. He wanted desperately to see in print the stories of the life surrounding him, to see the wretched truth, the dignity despite the indignity. When I first met him, I had no idea that I was making a pact with a taskmaster more demanding than any editor. He was ruthless in his criticism, his disdain for my soft educated style. “East L.A. boy makes good and gets out of the barrio. Get real, Balboa.” So I said if I ever got a Pulitzer, he could take the prize money. “Fifty percent is fine. Otherwise you got no incentive,” he smirked, but he never forgot this. He was always waving this thing in front of me like he was the one giving out the Pulitzers himself.
“You Pulitzer material or not, Balboa?” he now injected into the conversation.
“Maybe I should quit this business and do something really altruistic. Like go into teaching.”
“You won’t. Teaching is a recognition of talent, Balboa. First kid you flunk gonna go out and get himself a million-dollar record deal. At least out here on the streets, you have me. If you’d been connected before, you wouldn’t have gotten your ass kicked by that Webb reporter in San Jose.”
“Right.” What was there to argue? “So where do I find him, and what’s his name?”
“Last sighted: Harbor overpass, near Fifth. Name’s Manzanar.”
“Sounds vague, Buzz. Maybe we better go back to the drowning.”
“Trust me on this one. It’s gonna be big.” Buzzworm liked to taunt me with banter he believed to be newspaper talk. “I got a hunch,” he said, as if this should seal the story’s fate. Trouble with dismissing him was that lately he knew better than me.
“So what’s the latest conspiracy theory on the street?”
“Word is the players change, but the game’s the same. And on that note, Balboa: that other hot tip you been waiting for? Tomorrow a.m. LAX. Mexicana. Ten twenty. C. Juárez. No luggage. Carry-on only.”
“That’s it?”
“Just be grateful.” He hung up.
I went back to my desk, opened my afternoon mail, flipped through some personal stuff like the copy of a bank transfer of money to my account in Mazatlán. I thought about Rafaela down at my place in México. It had taken so many years to build the place, I didn’t really care anymore. I just wanted to see it finished even though I knew it would never be finished. I imagined Rafaela there, padding across the tile floors in her bare feet, her dark hair crinkling in the summer humidity, her soft Afro-Mayan features bronzed by the Mexican sun slipping in and out of the green shadows. I imagined the industry of her hands and mind, running my accounts, paying the workers, planting, placing, arranging, completing my foolish love affair.
How many friends, how many women had I taken there, forcing them to share my excitement, enduring their veiled compliments, knowing it was just another vacation for them? If I were ever to live there, my friends would not follow me, least of all Emi. There were only variations of nothing to do. Or as Emi commented, “There’s only so much sex and tequila you can stand.” It was the sort of place writers love. But as time went on, I had to admit to myself that I was really not a writer: I was a reporter. The current event, the late-breaking story, the three o’clock budgets, deadlines, secret sources I had painstakingly built up over the years, and the cutting edge of the interview: I realized I could never abandon this life for the endless lull of a private paradise.
And yet lately I found myself thinking constantly about Rafaela. I remembered her fingers lightly tickling the lines in my palm. “It seems you will encounter some big adventures,” she suggested. “And a long life.” She followed my life line. I couldn’t imagine her returning to her husband, returning to her janitorial jobs, ever again running the vacuum under my feet in the evenings and gently complaining, “Gabriel, drinking coffee again at this hour. It’s bad for you. Time to go home. Come on now. You’re in my way. How can my crew do its job when you reporters never leave?” This was a world I was sure she had left for good, and I could now only imagine Rafaela in my place, in my home, there.
I took the stairs down, my heels squeak
ing on the last flight of marble steps and out the foyer. The rush of heat and humidity outside the glass doors was sudden and oppressive. I walked quickly through scattered crowds and traffic, all moving as if in unison in one great stoic groan, languishing under the hot sunlight. And then I realized how strange this was: in the middle of towering thirty- and forty-floor buildings there was not a single shadow, not a sliver of a cooler gray to slice the concrete walks. The sun had aimed its rays straight down into the downtown canyon. At this hour it seemed impossible. Everything had the eerie tones of searing white and grimy black.
I walked west with some urgency, determined to find my subject. I marched toward the bridge over the Harbor Freeway, but no one stood out. About midway over the bridge, I paused, looked over into the river of traffic below. A sooty heat and din emanated from there, pressed against what I imagined to be all the elastic parts of my body: my lungs, my diaphragm, my tympanum.
And as I looked across, I saw him. Buzzworm was right. There he was larger than life, under the raging sun and a disheveled shock of white hair, a face both of anguish and incredible peace, his arms reaching and caressing the air for the sound and rhythms of . . . of what?
CHAPTER 7:
To WakeThe Marketplace
No one knew where he came from,
or how long he had lived,
how many years,
decades,
and yet he seemed a child,
yet not such a child to be without season
nor such an old man to be without reason.
When he removed his clothing, he revealed weathered skin stretched like fragile paper over brittle bones, revealed the holes in the sides of his torso and the purple stain across his neck, the solid scars of tissue that padded both his feet. He possessed the beauty of an ancient body, a gnarled and twisted tree, tortured and serene, wise and innocent all at once. Here, in this body-tree—more like bamboo than birch, more like birch than oak, more like oak than pine, more like pine than sequoia, more like sequoia than cactus, more like cactus—was the secret of his youth and the secret of his age.
He said that he had come from a long way away, from the very tip of the Tierra del Fuego, from Isla Negra, from the very top of Macchu Picchu, from the very bottom of the Foz do Iguaçu, but perhaps it was only a long way in his quixotic mind. And yet his voice was often a jumble of unknown dialects, guttural and whining, Latin mixed with every aboriginal, colonial, slave, or immigrant tongue, a great confusion discernible to all and to none at all. Yo soy el Frito Bandito, he said. Bebes Coca-Cola? Stuff like that.
Of course this was part of an accomplished performance, but no one was ever certain whether it was just a performance. No one was certain where or how he had perfected his art. He was actor and prankster, mimic and comic, freak, a one-man circus act. He did it all himself—the animals, the scenery, the contraptions, the music, the sound effects, all the characters, the narration, advertising, and tickets. He did big epics and short poetry—as short as a single haiku—romantic musicals, political scandal, and, as they say, comical tragedy and tragical comedy. And he was not beyond doing provocative, exploitive, or sensational work; timing was everything. Across the border, they had a name for such multiple types: they would call him a performance artist. This designation would entitle him to local, state, federal, and private funding. Well, he didn’t know it yet, but that’s where he was going: North.
He had performed with the greatest, with La Argentina in Buenos Aires, with Carmen Miranda in Rio de Janeiro and Ornitorrinco in São Paulo, with El Teatro Nacional in Santiago, with Cantiflas in la Ciudad de México. At one time he was called the Latino Ronald Reagan—a facetious comparison of his own making, but of course he said he had always turned down Hollywood. He had performed for the people, for the masses, on street corners, in cabarets, in dirty saloons, in churches and plazas, in bordellos and cemeteries. He performed for the rich, the famous, and the infamous; for household names: for Che in Bolivia, for Eva Perón, for Pelé, for Pinochet, and Allende before that, for El General Stroessner, for Pablo Escobar and the DEA, for Noriega, for Vargas Llosa and Fujimori, for Somoza and Sandino, Borges and Neruda, for Archbishop Romero, Porfirio Díaz, and Fidel. When they put him in jail, he performed for his torturers. And when they tortured him, he performed for his fellow inmates. He died a thousand deaths, but they could never shut him up. They could never stop his body, his face, his physicality, the innuendo of a mere muscle, the silence of his presence, the fear of his glare, the emotion of his beating heart, the scream of his absence.
In one installation he wore wings and sat in a cage. Gabriel García Márquez himself came to the opening, drank martinis and tasted ceviche on little toasts in the society of society. Occasionally someone went to the cage and threw in bits of caviar and the olives from their drinks. Then someone noticed that the wings didn’t seem fake, weren’t strapped on or glued to his back, but were growing there. Arcangel. That was his name. His professional name. He turned to the black tie crowd and spread his wings, his thin decrepit body an angular mass beneath those magnificent appendages. Someone turned to García Márquez to ask the meaning of this, but he had disappeared.
And then there was that time in Montevideo on the steps of the opera house when Arcangel played the prophet. Chilam Quetzal, he called himself. (He didn’t sport wings this time. Prophets usually don’t.) He predicted doomsday based on the ancient belief that doom comes in fifty-two-year cycles. The only problem was to decipher when the first doom had occurred and other dooms hence. Perhaps there were a series of small dooms in consecutive fifty-two-year cycles. It was difficult to know. And yet, he stood there at the top of the steps with his calculator, gesticulating and prophesying, his thin body a writhing mass of anguish and foreboding.
The end of the world as we know it is coming!
It will come in 2012,
exactly ten cycles of fifty-two years
from the time Christopher Columbus
discovered San Salvador, Cuba, Haiti,
and the Dominican Republic in 1492!
Think of it!
The last greatest doom that marked
the end of the world as we knew it.
The great discovery!
The great curse!
And this because of a lousy bunch of spices
to hide the putrefaction of meat!
However, he said, it was possible to judge the first doom in the Western Hemisphere as having occurred in 1494 when Columbus discovered Jamaica or in 1498 when he discovered Trinidad and Venezuela. Others might place the first doom in 1502 when Columbus discovered Martinique. By these calculations, doomsday could be predicted to be 2014, 2018, or 2022.
Repent, sinners!
Prepare for the worst!
The fifty-second year is approaching!
Now, if we calculate the first doom
from the time John Cabot discovered
Newfoundland and the North American continent,
he cried, waving his arms, punching numbers into the calculator and reading from the flickering LCD in the sunlight,
then I predict doom will come,
as sure as I am standing here,
in the year of 2017!
Perhaps people thought that doom could be pushed forward and away, that the fifty-second year could be recalculated from a later date, but doom, Arcangel assured everyone, would come anyway. The tremor in his voice was enough to convince everyone.
Ah woe is the great land of Brazil,
discovered in 1500
by Pedro Alvares Cabral.
Doom! Doom! Doom!
Doom in the year 2020!
Or,
Woe is Patagonia
discovered by Ferdinand Magellan in 1519.
In this year also,
Hernán Cortés discovered México.
Ah, all is lost!
Doomed.
Doomed to destruction in 2039!
And what of Argentina
discovered by M
agellan in 1520?
Think of it!
The year 2040 is not so far away.
He pointed to a young man.
In your lifetime, you will see it!
If you believe that you will be spared,
think again.
Only death will spare you.
Every year
there has been a historic discovery of our lands
to make the dates of doom a certainty.
It was as he said. In 1524, Giovanni da Verazano discovered North Carolina and the New York harbor, and later, in 1528, he discovered the site of the Panama Canal. In 1534, Jacques Cartier discovered Canada, the Saint Lawrence River, and Quebec. In 1513, Vasco Núñez de Balboa discovered the Pacific Ocean. In 1542, Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo discovered the islands of California, Santa Catalina, and San Clemente and the bays of San Diego and Santa Monica and the Bay of Smoke of San Pedro. In 1602, Sebastian Vizcaíno discovered the Bay of Monterey. In 1610, Henry Hudson discovered the Hudson Bay. In 1621, the Pilgrims discovered Plymouth Rock. There was no escape! If doom did not come as he first predicted, in 2012, then it could also be expected in 2044, 2048, 2054, 2062, 2070, 2078, or 2087.
Doom! Doom!
Look to the past and know the doom that awaits you!
The doom of discovery!
The doom of conquest!
And worse yet,
who among the discoverers
did not plant their seed in this land of discovery?
Now all is lost! We will pay dearly!
I, Chilam Quetzal, the soothsayer, have spoken!
But that was in Montevideo, many years ago.
Lately he had been seen on street corners in México City, juggling balls representing the planets of the solar system while spinning a replica of the sun on his nose. He, like E.T., was very good at this, keeping Pluto on the outer ring, juggling everything—Saturn, Uranus, Venus, Jupiter, etc., even the moon around the Earth—in great ellipses. Children and passersby agreed to hold candles around him to represent the stars. The spectacle produced sudden wonder and, eyes glistening through tears, people emptied their purses and pockets into his waiting hat.
Tropic of Orange Page 6
