Edinburgh is all types of grey. All the greys in the rainbow. Monochromatic splendour: Granite grey, flagstone grey, rainy day grey, cold winter grey, fog grey, dawn grey, ghost grey, North Sea grey, Earl grey, gray grey. Take your photaes in black and white because you won’t be able to tell the difference. If that’s a problem for you, well, go to Cancun and stop wasting my damn time. As for all the rest you’s, come swim with me in the Old Smelly.
Watch out for the ghosts – here be spirits. Not counting the 20 quid tours or the wax museums or out of work stage actors shambling around in costumes and face paint, this is a place bathed in the shadows of its past. Whispers swirl through the cobblestone streets stinging your cheeks and freezing your ears. They whistle inside churches and castles, echo off crumbling stones and twist into little cyclones like dry autumn leaves. Chase them down dark passages, deep into the stone maze of the city built upon itself. They elude you at every turn with the mischief of children at play flitting around corners or disappearing down hidden closes, forever one step ahead. But keep on, my friend, don’t be deterred by the shenanigans of the dead for they’re an ornery bunch. You’ll find them again when you least expect it and resume your chase through the perpetual twilight. Every corner reveals new delights, every passage forks into new options. Go right, left, up down, and don’t miss a chance to detour…until, as if awakening from a dream, you look around to find yourself lost and alone while thick clouds like puffs of dirty wool rush by overhead.
The winds always blow cold and clammy from the sea steeping the place an ageless brine. It is a bouillabaisse of smog, runoff and melancholy spiced liberally with sea salt, malted barley and a pinch of something wild and peppery blown in from those big, empty Scottish fields. It soaks in and chills you, makes your steps heavier and sharpens each breath to the edge of a sigh. The days are bleaker, the nights darker. Solitude tippy-toes behind you, closing with every block as you wander through the deep, jagged chiaroscuro of the Old Town, the lonely sound of your footsteps echoing off the MC Escher architecture.
But there is laugher in the dark – short reports that spill from the open doors of lambent pubs that shine like pirate treasure. Look in the window street urchin style and see the grinning people crowded around the gleaming hardwood bar quaffing pints, sipping wine, and starting to talk just a little too loudly. Famous drunks, these strange, northern folk. See how they smile as if they have never known winter? Don’t stand outside and stare like a tourist! Go in. Go in because the damp’s long fingers can’t reach you there. The light and the laughter burn off the eddying gloom, turn it out and beat in back into the street, holding it at bay for as long as the taps flow.
Inside the murmur becomes a din, Oasis on the juke box, video gambling machines ring and jingle…. and the smell, oh the smell. Hops and fried goodies, eau de steak pie, stale beer, vinegar and ketchup, scones and sticky toffee pudding grumble in the hollow of your stomach. But no food for the hungry when there is drinking to be done: Tenants or Stella – the quintessential Scotsman’s conundrum. National pride vs. foreign quality. Have a whisky if you like, but you’ll have to either join the pensioners at one end of the of the bar, all tweeds and snaggle toothed glares or those grinning Americans to the right, cloistered away in their corner pontificating on the authenticity of their ‘discovery’. Best to avoid both and grab a lager, its safe, its tasty, and it comes in a pint with a respectable head that never goes flat to leave you with something that looks like a bucket of dehydrated pish.
By the third or fourth, it doesn’t matter anyway – you’re charged up and ready to make merry. Dive back into the night, brace yourself for that first lung full of brine, feel it seep down your collar even as your shoulders tense to head it off. But wait, not slithering in so easy this time, eh? Your alcohol aura beats it back valiantly. Make haste, now, the remedy is fleeting, and there is much yet to see. Follow the whispers: searching, searching, always searching in this city as if its secrets will be revealed if you just look hard enough. Ah, you should know better ya wee fookin drunk.
Pay the ten quid for the club, past the Eastern European bouncers who are probably nice guys in their free time and…welcome to Hell. From icy cold to sweating hot in seconds, bodies move like Sodom and Gomorrah, now if you can just make out a face. Woah, that’s a lot of makeup, bonus points for the short skirt though, shame about that extra weight. It’s necessary for the winters, like a seal. Not fat, maybe, but something torpid about it, sallow in the strobe lights, a strange crook to the eyes, a small gene pooled skew of the features that is either enchanting or nightmarish. The ghosts are quiet here in the Cathedral of Kanye West, Westlife and DJ Westwood. WWDJ? Drink and dance, no doubt. Your free mixed drink goes down the hatch like water and you start to miss those mischievous echoes. What did you say your name was? Well, nice to meet you too. There’s a girl under all that makeup and she digs you, stranger. Think she said she was a hairdresser…or maybe just in beauty school, the lowlighted hair is the give away. She talks pretty, rolling her ‘r’s’ over rrrazor sharrrp rrrocks every time she leans in close to tell you something because you can’t understand a damn thing over that music. Conversation is shouted and never more than half understood, the mysteries of the world contained in all the words swallowed by the tumult. Doesn’t matter though, you’re both driving to the same end, kissing before you know it – Gable and Leigh with everything burning down behind you – Scottish girl eh? Check that one off your list and hurry out the back before she asks for your number.
That’s what cold feels like. It puts a hop in your step and reminds you that death is not so far off. Follow those whispers and try not to stagger like the dead because the bars close at four and you need a final drink to stave off that ever-gathering gloom. Somewhere far below the castle lit up in the night like the gates of heaven, through the low door, back into warmth, laughter, cheer. The Barmaid is Polish, certified peaches and cream, but you know she hears that from every drunk loser who bangs his head coming through the door so whisper those sweet everything’s to your pint. The end draws near, the acqua vitae drains from your veins, evaporating into ether, replacing immortality with a dull fragility, mortality regained with just a little less time on the clock. Can’t go home like this, can you? Get one more round in for all your new best friends. It won’t hurt till the morning when the light and the laughter have gone and your room is icy cold, chafing your skin raw where it peeks out from under the too short duvet. You need a pish and a drink, but your head says nay to even lifting a leg out of bed, much less stumbling down the hall to a communal bathroom. So hangover swagger to the sink, turn on the warm tap –always the warm tap, as a Scotsman once said – and let it loose. When you’ve washed away the medicinal smell of alcohol pee, change taps and take a drink. The water is colder and sweeter than French kissing an Eskimo princess. That’s the taste of hope…that the hangover will pass, the shadows will recede and the coal skies will lighten to grey once again.
Showing posts with label People and Places. Show all posts
Showing posts with label People and Places. Show all posts
Wednesday, November 12, 2008
Thursday, November 6, 2008
Welcome
Time as you know it means nothing in New York City. It’s a place that doesn’t know where its going, can’t be bothered to remember where its been and is only concerned with the gas in the tank, the cigarette dangling from its lips and having the pedal firmly planted on the floor. Yesterday is ancient history, today is too late and tomorrow is already passing you by. Fasten your seat belts and hold on tight, baby baby – things only get crazier from here.
This city whispers the language of Babel. It’s thousand tongued breath whips through concrete, steel and glass canyons to snatch your hat off and water your eyes. Don’t matter where you’re from, my friend, everyone understands you in New York. It’s a labyrinth of the insane, which is just a cynical way to say that it’s the biggest, wildest party in the world and anything goes as long as you pay the piper. Farsi in the cab, Chinese in the restaurant, Japanese at the bar and Spanish anywhere else. Maybe you just speak that other language that comes up occasionally here, but don’t fret, baby baby, because everyone understands the green. That’s why they have come to this city reaching unto heaven and that is why you are here too. One world, united in the pursuit of dead presidents. That’s beautiful corruption – shining and stinking “like a rotting mackerel by moonlight,” *
Don’t be fooled by the fun. It may be a party, but it’s not a punch bowled, finger food and funny hatted affair. It’s an exclusive deal and the odds are on you not quite making the cut. Only the richest, hardest, best connected, or just plain lucky make it across the East River to sip 10 dollar biers and sneer at the less fortunate, and the more you think about it as you lay in bed alone at night, the more you suspect that maybe babee…that’s just not tú. It’s the biggest fishbowl in the world, my little minnow and everyone likes sushi, so grab some chopsticks, a bottle of soy sauce, and let the cannibalism begin because they strive like pyrates on Manhattan island – no quarter given and none expected – let the bones of the fallen pave the sidewalks.
Constant. Pathological. Renewal. New York has been the city of tomorrow since roughly 1939 and shows no signs of giving up that position. Unlike other places whose reputations are built upon past greatness, every day is a hey day in Nueva York. Every 24 hours the bar is raised, mounted, then raised again, infinitely onward because it’s too late to turn back and they lost sight of the ground long ago. Every morning, the city yawns, stretches and gets back to the grim business of outdoing itself.
And you want a part of all of this? You want a little slice of this concrete anthill that you can call your own? Perhaps. Or perhaps what you really want is to walk to the edge of apocalypse and out there in that rushing darkness you want to squint off into the directionless void and scream and howl right along with it. You can find that kind of thrill in a place like this. If you brace yourself and open your eyes, you can catch a flash of the true wonder and ferocity of the human endeavour. It will last for a second then disappear like the tail of a shooting star – a tear in the gossamer of reality. You can’t forget though. Not once you’ve seen it. Its burned into you with a white hot acetylene glow so you either slap a bad-aid on and keep swimming or sink to the bottom to have your bones picked clean by the other fishies.
The game is fast and the stakes are high in the Giant Fruit Machine, so keep your wits on your sleeve and your nose to the grind. If the rules keep changing, well…that’s par for the course, baby baby – it’s what you get for going 18 with the maniacs. If you fail to rise, sometimes you have to dig your way up through the basement just so you can get a seat at the golf-green table where the real game is happening. If you can’t beat’em, cheat’em,” as my acquaintance Kid Klipse likes to say; so if you get tired of the same, change the game, because rules mean nothing to the insane.
*John Randolph
This city whispers the language of Babel. It’s thousand tongued breath whips through concrete, steel and glass canyons to snatch your hat off and water your eyes. Don’t matter where you’re from, my friend, everyone understands you in New York. It’s a labyrinth of the insane, which is just a cynical way to say that it’s the biggest, wildest party in the world and anything goes as long as you pay the piper. Farsi in the cab, Chinese in the restaurant, Japanese at the bar and Spanish anywhere else. Maybe you just speak that other language that comes up occasionally here, but don’t fret, baby baby, because everyone understands the green. That’s why they have come to this city reaching unto heaven and that is why you are here too. One world, united in the pursuit of dead presidents. That’s beautiful corruption – shining and stinking “like a rotting mackerel by moonlight,” *
Don’t be fooled by the fun. It may be a party, but it’s not a punch bowled, finger food and funny hatted affair. It’s an exclusive deal and the odds are on you not quite making the cut. Only the richest, hardest, best connected, or just plain lucky make it across the East River to sip 10 dollar biers and sneer at the less fortunate, and the more you think about it as you lay in bed alone at night, the more you suspect that maybe babee…that’s just not tú. It’s the biggest fishbowl in the world, my little minnow and everyone likes sushi, so grab some chopsticks, a bottle of soy sauce, and let the cannibalism begin because they strive like pyrates on Manhattan island – no quarter given and none expected – let the bones of the fallen pave the sidewalks.
Constant. Pathological. Renewal. New York has been the city of tomorrow since roughly 1939 and shows no signs of giving up that position. Unlike other places whose reputations are built upon past greatness, every day is a hey day in Nueva York. Every 24 hours the bar is raised, mounted, then raised again, infinitely onward because it’s too late to turn back and they lost sight of the ground long ago. Every morning, the city yawns, stretches and gets back to the grim business of outdoing itself.
And you want a part of all of this? You want a little slice of this concrete anthill that you can call your own? Perhaps. Or perhaps what you really want is to walk to the edge of apocalypse and out there in that rushing darkness you want to squint off into the directionless void and scream and howl right along with it. You can find that kind of thrill in a place like this. If you brace yourself and open your eyes, you can catch a flash of the true wonder and ferocity of the human endeavour. It will last for a second then disappear like the tail of a shooting star – a tear in the gossamer of reality. You can’t forget though. Not once you’ve seen it. Its burned into you with a white hot acetylene glow so you either slap a bad-aid on and keep swimming or sink to the bottom to have your bones picked clean by the other fishies.
The game is fast and the stakes are high in the Giant Fruit Machine, so keep your wits on your sleeve and your nose to the grind. If the rules keep changing, well…that’s par for the course, baby baby – it’s what you get for going 18 with the maniacs. If you fail to rise, sometimes you have to dig your way up through the basement just so you can get a seat at the golf-green table where the real game is happening. If you can’t beat’em, cheat’em,” as my acquaintance Kid Klipse likes to say; so if you get tired of the same, change the game, because rules mean nothing to the insane.
*John Randolph
Tuesday, October 21, 2008
Bus Drivers
I was sitting on a city bus late one Sunday night in Montevideo, Uruguay, with no idea where I was, only a vague idea of where I was going, and not a clue when to get off.
“I’ll tell you when to get off,” the driver had assured me before ratcheting up the volume of the Cumbia blaring from the radio and zoning back in on the road. That had been half an hour ago. Now we were the only two carbon based life forms in the cavernous vehicles and I was beginning to worry. There are certain situations in life that I generally try to avoid – gambling with criminals, talking politics with Basques, associating with people who kiss their dogs, etc. Paramount among these situations is putting more of my fate than is absolutely necessary in the hands of bus drivers. I respect them, I always do what they say and I am even somewhat in awe of them, but I won’t ever trust a bus driver.
They aren’t like you and me. They are made of different stuff – eyes like falcons, the reflexes of professional athletes, nerves that are made from twisted coils of sheet metal and barbed wire. They have ether running through their veins like summer ice flows in the arctic and less pity in their hearts than tiger sharks, which is to say nothing of the inscrutable mysteries of their minds. Like truckers, pilots or Hell’s Angels, they are creatures of that rare order who base their lives around being neither sedentary nor nomadic; instead choosing to inhabit a constant stage of en-route. They are always moving, but never arriving. Most people, including those who travel professionally, construct their lives around specific points on the map. House, office, school; Ohio, California, North Carolina; Paris, London, New York. Bus driver’s lives are dominated by the lines in between these points, by the dizzying infinity of unreachable horizons – momentos sin mori. There is a certain kinetic romance to all of it; answering the call of the road while providing societies with a valuable service, that is both paradigmatic and slightly sinister.
Like many American kids, my first bus drivers were the men and women who piloted the classic yellow clunkers that shuttled me and every other rowdy little bastard in my neighbourhood to school. For one reason or another, most went by their first names preceded by Mr. or Mrs., i.e.: Mr. Bill, Mr. Mike, Mrs. Cheryl and so forth. I don’t remember them as being an overly amiable bunch. But then, can you imagine what you would be like if you had to drive while trying to maintain control of 30 kids without ever being able to turn around and face them? A few days of that, and most people would be parking on train tracks. Not Mrs. Carroll. No siree, Crazy Carroll bussed me for 5 years and was harder than old rebar. She could scream the glare off a pit bull if you pushed her far enough, which was rare, but everyone has their limits, and when we felt those massive air breaks lock and grind us to an abrupt halt, we all knew that someone had pushed too far. The only time there was ever complete silence on bus 13 was when Crazy Carroll pulled that mother over with a great hiss of the breaks to stalk back through the aisle and pluck some unfortunate troublemaker away from their friends like a dues ex machina with tinted prescription glasses. That person was condemned to the front seat (naturally being the least cool spot on the bus) for a few days or weeks, or until Mrs. Carroll forgot she was punishing them. I feared her like one fears the abandoned, supposedly haunted house so common in neighbourhoods across the Midwest: with equal parts love and aversion. Without her piercing scowl and the threat of biblical wrath that it promised, throwing things or shouting curse words out the window or switching seats in transit lost all the fun. For 178 days of the school year, she was my mortal enemy, but she always got a gift at Christmas and hug at the end of the year.
By the time I was old enough to start getting on buses by myself that weren’t yellow, I was living in Scotland and using the Fifelink to get just about everywhere I needed to go between Edinburgh and the historic port city of Dundee. The bus drivers of the kingdom of Fife, who like all Scots, consider themselves stronger, heartier, funnier, smarter, and better drinkers than their English counterparts are one wild bunch of Jacobites. Many are local boys from fishing towns like Arbroath, St. Monans or Crail who sport faded tattoos on their forearms and speak in rolling, guttural Scottish accents harshened by smoke and booze. They drive harder and faster than most sane people would even imagine over country lanes whose only berms are low stone walls that hug the sides of the roads like something out of a bucolic Monaco Grand Prix. Oncoming traffic always made me nervous; the wheels on the left side of the bus flirting with the edge of the road as the wheels on the right rubbed hubcaps with unlucky Peugeots, Renaults and Datsuns. Passing trucks or God forbid, other busses, was like jousting with side view mirrors. Those men seemed less like drivers to me, and more insane physicists, their demented minds working out angles, quadrants and trajectories while they were buckled to the front of 15 tons of steel doing fifty miles an hour down a windy, pot-holed strip of asphalt.
If there is very little room for error in the Scottish country- side, there is none on the Amalfi coast where the Italian land mass loses all hope and plummets into the Mediterranean. When I was 17, I took a tourist bus from Sorrento to X with one very cool Italian behind the wheel. His name was Andrea, and he apparently modelled himself out of a villain in Speed Racer. His uniform was composed of tinted sunglasses, tight, cream coloured trousers and matching shirt un-buttoned to reveal dark chest hair and a gold chain with icon of the Virgin Mary. To top off the ensemble, he sported an immaculate, cream coloured racing scarf, that I never saw him take off regardless of the temperature or time of day. Another thing I never saw him do was back up. This is a common practice among tourists and locals alike in the claustrophobic, zigzagging streets of towns along the Mediterranean. Drivers cut turns too closely and realize that they are going to rake their car across one of the roughly one million high stone walls in the province, so they stop, back up, and try again. Not Andrea. Perhaps he just had a good week, but the man never miss-judged a turn, and this in a vehicle twice the size of the puny rental cars that were forever clogging his playground.
Driving along that coastline can provoke intense vertigo. On one side of the road, mountains shoot straight upward, on the other, there is nothing but air and sparkling greenish blue water 100 feet below. Andrea cruised that two-lane death trap like he had been born to do it, cool as a polar bear in a snowstorm. The only time he even breathed was to chain smoke cigarettes when his human passengers stopped at overlook points to take pictures and vomit away car sickness. It takes a certain type of mind to be able to endure the daily pressure of knowing that 30 lives hang in the balance every time you turn the steering wheel or ease down on the accelerator. In Scotland, if you make a mistake, the worst that can usually happen is a few dead sheep and an irate farmer. On the Amalfi coast, the best case scenario is that you die from the impact of hitting the water and don’t have to wait to drown. I don’t know how he endured it, perhaps is had something to do the potent mix of nicotine and adrenaline that came with the job.
One thing Andrea never had to worry about was third world traffic. This is traffic ranging from bicycles to 18-wheelers to mule carts that clog the streets of many underdeveloped countries on any given day like a perversely anachronistic circus act. The well-worn surfer’s path between San Jose and Jaco, Costa Rica runs thick with just this type of traffic most days. It is a thin ribbon of unmarked black asphalt that sneaks through steamy rainforest-covered mountains in search of the pacific coast. Its impossible cut backs, harrowing descents and improbable curves give one the impression of a coil of rope thrown haphazardly on the ground. For drivers, travelling on it is a two and a half hour exercise in trying to keep yourself and your passengers alive while also not sending any one within your swarm of fellow commuters over a cliff to certain death. It’s a free for all with no quarter given and none expected. Engaged in battle are cars filled with commuting Ticos and long haired Californians stoned silly (Pura Vida, man!), animal drawn carts loaded with fruits and vegetables piloted by toothless, leathery skinned old men with wives and grandchildren in tow, motorbikes stacked with two and even three people hugging on to each other as they squirt between opposing traffic and as the piece de resistance, young boys between 10 and maybe 16 years old bombing past everyone else on one speed bikes sans breaks, sans helmet and sans any concept regarding the fragility of human life. Amid this chaos, Tico bus drivers, stone faced and sweating through their shirts in the tropical heat, crank up the salsa music and show everyone exactly who is boss. Thinking back, what strikes me most about their driving is that it was probably the smoothest of any that I have ever experienced, despite the unpredictability of the setting. They never jerked the wheel, never had to break abruptly and only once did I see someone misjudge a turn and have to back up. These were men that conducted their automotive monstrosities like they were out on a Sunday afternoon drive through the countryside. If you subtract animals, motorbikes, small trucks and bikers of the divine wind, I suppose that’s what it was.
Although the roads in Latin America are often challenging, the natural bloodlust of the conductors, their need to tempt laws of time, space and physics is limited by the overall age and unreliability of their vehicles. Not in Spain. Never have I seen or heard of a group that wasn’t an explicitly criminal organization brazenly flaunting more laws. An often employed Spanish curse is: “Me cago en dios” which refers to an improbably scatological act that Ernest Hemingway sometimes translated as “I profanity on God”. In a country where traffic laws are largely ignored in the first place, the bus drivers in Spain profanity on everything and everyone with hearty aplomb. They are like the Mafia, the Yakuza and the Teamsters all rolled into one fiery Latin syndicate. They ooze so much machismo that even the bullfighters look up to them.
In Alcalá de Henares, a dormitory city of Madrid where Cervantes was born, traffic in the centre of town often grinds to a halt for no apparent reason. There is no wreck, no road works, but instead two bus drivers, travelling in opposite directions who have recognized each other, stopped, and decided to carry on a brief conversation between their open windows. If they weren’t bus drivers, people would be profanitying on God, Jesus, the holy trinity, and most of the apostles. Instead, everyone chews their lips and resists the innate Latin urge to honk until the conversation ends. One gets the feeling that these men are less co-workers and more of a rolling fraternity. When they aren’t stopping to talk, they’re not tossing newspapers to their brethren in passing busses or making relay style hand-offs with books of crossword puzzles in the middle or rush hour.
Spain is also the country where I had the most singularly harrowing bus experience of my life. It happened on a trip from Madrid to the Southern port city of Cadiz. About halfway through the journey, the flat, straight roads are interrupted by a narrow belt of scrubby hills and steep, rocky ravines that the road winds its way through before coming out into more arid chaparral. I was sitting in the second row of seats behind the driver staring out the window as the final rays of sun disappeared over distant, sandy hills when a silver Mercedes cut us off. The driver slammed on his breaks, narrowly avoiding rear-ending the other car and released a string of expletives that involved a lot of profanitying on things like mothers and grandmothers and other distant female relations of the Merc driver. There was a moment of panic that quickly passed as the Mercedes sped up and our conductor eased off the break. Then something funny happened. Our driver sped up as well. Foot to the floor, he whipped around sharp curves and flew through narrow straightaways apparently pursuing the poor soul who had made the mistake of cutting him off. As we neared the Mercedes again, the conductor swiped on his high beams and laid on his horn, illuminating a woman in the back seat who had turned to look back and frozen in terror like a deer about to become venison. We came within inches of the other car and still our conductor persisted with his horn. I could see the terrified woman in the back seat screaming at the driver of the Mercedes to speed up or slow down or apologize or God only knows what else. Without warning, our conductor swerved into the left lane, and punched the gas. He flew by his opponent and cut him off with one fatal crank of the steering wheel throwing his arm out the window and shaking his fist in victory.
Just like that, he slowed down, turned off his high beams and everything returned to normal. Stunned, I took a deep breath, wiped my sweaty palms on my jeans and looked around at my other passengers, hoping to find some acknowledgement of the insanity we had all just experienced. Some munched happily on Serrano ham sandwiches, others dozed and many gave each other knowing looks and nodded in agreement. “He shouldn’t have cut off a bus driver…”
Which brings me back, more or less, to the question of trust. The famous statistic is that many more people die while driving than while flying, which is supposed to make me feel better about flying. It doesn’t though, because the worst part about air travel isn’t rocketing through the air like a bird, it’s having to trust someone I’ve never met to get me into and out of the sky in a semi-controlled fashion. I wouldn’t worry about flying if I were behind the controls or, perhaps wearing blue and red tights with a big S printed on my chest. But I don’t like explicitly putting my safety in the hands of people I don’t know. At best, I tolerate it. I can fly by telling myself that the pilots aren’t drunk or fresh out of making bombing runs from the USS whatever and I can use buses because I know that no one has more to lose than a driver who gets in a wreck.
Sitting on that bus in Uruguay, I remembered a similar experience in San Jose, Costa Rica where I was going to see a friend one afternoon. I had asked the bus driver in polite, heavily accented, mostly butchered Spanish if he could advise me when we got to a certain stop.
“No te preocupes,” he assured me.
So I didn’t preocuparme, until an hour later, when I found myself at the exact spot that I had gotten on the bus. He turned around and shrugged, opening the door for me to get out and try my luck with someone a bit more compassionate.
So that was running through my head in Montevideo, squinting out of dark windows, trying to make out familiar landmarks, already beginning to curse the silent conductor for having forgotten me. Then he turned around.
“Flaco! La próxima es tuya.”
Slightly surprised, I snatched up my bag and got to the door as quickly as I could, lest he deem that I was taking too long and drive on to the next stop. As I walked through the double doors into the chilly night, I turned back and thanked him. He looked at me with an indecipherable expression, shrugged as if to say: “What did you expect? I’m a bus driver.” then slammed the doors shut and roared off into the night.
“I’ll tell you when to get off,” the driver had assured me before ratcheting up the volume of the Cumbia blaring from the radio and zoning back in on the road. That had been half an hour ago. Now we were the only two carbon based life forms in the cavernous vehicles and I was beginning to worry. There are certain situations in life that I generally try to avoid – gambling with criminals, talking politics with Basques, associating with people who kiss their dogs, etc. Paramount among these situations is putting more of my fate than is absolutely necessary in the hands of bus drivers. I respect them, I always do what they say and I am even somewhat in awe of them, but I won’t ever trust a bus driver.
They aren’t like you and me. They are made of different stuff – eyes like falcons, the reflexes of professional athletes, nerves that are made from twisted coils of sheet metal and barbed wire. They have ether running through their veins like summer ice flows in the arctic and less pity in their hearts than tiger sharks, which is to say nothing of the inscrutable mysteries of their minds. Like truckers, pilots or Hell’s Angels, they are creatures of that rare order who base their lives around being neither sedentary nor nomadic; instead choosing to inhabit a constant stage of en-route. They are always moving, but never arriving. Most people, including those who travel professionally, construct their lives around specific points on the map. House, office, school; Ohio, California, North Carolina; Paris, London, New York. Bus driver’s lives are dominated by the lines in between these points, by the dizzying infinity of unreachable horizons – momentos sin mori. There is a certain kinetic romance to all of it; answering the call of the road while providing societies with a valuable service, that is both paradigmatic and slightly sinister.
Like many American kids, my first bus drivers were the men and women who piloted the classic yellow clunkers that shuttled me and every other rowdy little bastard in my neighbourhood to school. For one reason or another, most went by their first names preceded by Mr. or Mrs., i.e.: Mr. Bill, Mr. Mike, Mrs. Cheryl and so forth. I don’t remember them as being an overly amiable bunch. But then, can you imagine what you would be like if you had to drive while trying to maintain control of 30 kids without ever being able to turn around and face them? A few days of that, and most people would be parking on train tracks. Not Mrs. Carroll. No siree, Crazy Carroll bussed me for 5 years and was harder than old rebar. She could scream the glare off a pit bull if you pushed her far enough, which was rare, but everyone has their limits, and when we felt those massive air breaks lock and grind us to an abrupt halt, we all knew that someone had pushed too far. The only time there was ever complete silence on bus 13 was when Crazy Carroll pulled that mother over with a great hiss of the breaks to stalk back through the aisle and pluck some unfortunate troublemaker away from their friends like a dues ex machina with tinted prescription glasses. That person was condemned to the front seat (naturally being the least cool spot on the bus) for a few days or weeks, or until Mrs. Carroll forgot she was punishing them. I feared her like one fears the abandoned, supposedly haunted house so common in neighbourhoods across the Midwest: with equal parts love and aversion. Without her piercing scowl and the threat of biblical wrath that it promised, throwing things or shouting curse words out the window or switching seats in transit lost all the fun. For 178 days of the school year, she was my mortal enemy, but she always got a gift at Christmas and hug at the end of the year.
By the time I was old enough to start getting on buses by myself that weren’t yellow, I was living in Scotland and using the Fifelink to get just about everywhere I needed to go between Edinburgh and the historic port city of Dundee. The bus drivers of the kingdom of Fife, who like all Scots, consider themselves stronger, heartier, funnier, smarter, and better drinkers than their English counterparts are one wild bunch of Jacobites. Many are local boys from fishing towns like Arbroath, St. Monans or Crail who sport faded tattoos on their forearms and speak in rolling, guttural Scottish accents harshened by smoke and booze. They drive harder and faster than most sane people would even imagine over country lanes whose only berms are low stone walls that hug the sides of the roads like something out of a bucolic Monaco Grand Prix. Oncoming traffic always made me nervous; the wheels on the left side of the bus flirting with the edge of the road as the wheels on the right rubbed hubcaps with unlucky Peugeots, Renaults and Datsuns. Passing trucks or God forbid, other busses, was like jousting with side view mirrors. Those men seemed less like drivers to me, and more insane physicists, their demented minds working out angles, quadrants and trajectories while they were buckled to the front of 15 tons of steel doing fifty miles an hour down a windy, pot-holed strip of asphalt.
If there is very little room for error in the Scottish country- side, there is none on the Amalfi coast where the Italian land mass loses all hope and plummets into the Mediterranean. When I was 17, I took a tourist bus from Sorrento to X with one very cool Italian behind the wheel. His name was Andrea, and he apparently modelled himself out of a villain in Speed Racer. His uniform was composed of tinted sunglasses, tight, cream coloured trousers and matching shirt un-buttoned to reveal dark chest hair and a gold chain with icon of the Virgin Mary. To top off the ensemble, he sported an immaculate, cream coloured racing scarf, that I never saw him take off regardless of the temperature or time of day. Another thing I never saw him do was back up. This is a common practice among tourists and locals alike in the claustrophobic, zigzagging streets of towns along the Mediterranean. Drivers cut turns too closely and realize that they are going to rake their car across one of the roughly one million high stone walls in the province, so they stop, back up, and try again. Not Andrea. Perhaps he just had a good week, but the man never miss-judged a turn, and this in a vehicle twice the size of the puny rental cars that were forever clogging his playground.
Driving along that coastline can provoke intense vertigo. On one side of the road, mountains shoot straight upward, on the other, there is nothing but air and sparkling greenish blue water 100 feet below. Andrea cruised that two-lane death trap like he had been born to do it, cool as a polar bear in a snowstorm. The only time he even breathed was to chain smoke cigarettes when his human passengers stopped at overlook points to take pictures and vomit away car sickness. It takes a certain type of mind to be able to endure the daily pressure of knowing that 30 lives hang in the balance every time you turn the steering wheel or ease down on the accelerator. In Scotland, if you make a mistake, the worst that can usually happen is a few dead sheep and an irate farmer. On the Amalfi coast, the best case scenario is that you die from the impact of hitting the water and don’t have to wait to drown. I don’t know how he endured it, perhaps is had something to do the potent mix of nicotine and adrenaline that came with the job.
One thing Andrea never had to worry about was third world traffic. This is traffic ranging from bicycles to 18-wheelers to mule carts that clog the streets of many underdeveloped countries on any given day like a perversely anachronistic circus act. The well-worn surfer’s path between San Jose and Jaco, Costa Rica runs thick with just this type of traffic most days. It is a thin ribbon of unmarked black asphalt that sneaks through steamy rainforest-covered mountains in search of the pacific coast. Its impossible cut backs, harrowing descents and improbable curves give one the impression of a coil of rope thrown haphazardly on the ground. For drivers, travelling on it is a two and a half hour exercise in trying to keep yourself and your passengers alive while also not sending any one within your swarm of fellow commuters over a cliff to certain death. It’s a free for all with no quarter given and none expected. Engaged in battle are cars filled with commuting Ticos and long haired Californians stoned silly (Pura Vida, man!), animal drawn carts loaded with fruits and vegetables piloted by toothless, leathery skinned old men with wives and grandchildren in tow, motorbikes stacked with two and even three people hugging on to each other as they squirt between opposing traffic and as the piece de resistance, young boys between 10 and maybe 16 years old bombing past everyone else on one speed bikes sans breaks, sans helmet and sans any concept regarding the fragility of human life. Amid this chaos, Tico bus drivers, stone faced and sweating through their shirts in the tropical heat, crank up the salsa music and show everyone exactly who is boss. Thinking back, what strikes me most about their driving is that it was probably the smoothest of any that I have ever experienced, despite the unpredictability of the setting. They never jerked the wheel, never had to break abruptly and only once did I see someone misjudge a turn and have to back up. These were men that conducted their automotive monstrosities like they were out on a Sunday afternoon drive through the countryside. If you subtract animals, motorbikes, small trucks and bikers of the divine wind, I suppose that’s what it was.
Although the roads in Latin America are often challenging, the natural bloodlust of the conductors, their need to tempt laws of time, space and physics is limited by the overall age and unreliability of their vehicles. Not in Spain. Never have I seen or heard of a group that wasn’t an explicitly criminal organization brazenly flaunting more laws. An often employed Spanish curse is: “Me cago en dios” which refers to an improbably scatological act that Ernest Hemingway sometimes translated as “I profanity on God”. In a country where traffic laws are largely ignored in the first place, the bus drivers in Spain profanity on everything and everyone with hearty aplomb. They are like the Mafia, the Yakuza and the Teamsters all rolled into one fiery Latin syndicate. They ooze so much machismo that even the bullfighters look up to them.
In Alcalá de Henares, a dormitory city of Madrid where Cervantes was born, traffic in the centre of town often grinds to a halt for no apparent reason. There is no wreck, no road works, but instead two bus drivers, travelling in opposite directions who have recognized each other, stopped, and decided to carry on a brief conversation between their open windows. If they weren’t bus drivers, people would be profanitying on God, Jesus, the holy trinity, and most of the apostles. Instead, everyone chews their lips and resists the innate Latin urge to honk until the conversation ends. One gets the feeling that these men are less co-workers and more of a rolling fraternity. When they aren’t stopping to talk, they’re not tossing newspapers to their brethren in passing busses or making relay style hand-offs with books of crossword puzzles in the middle or rush hour.
Spain is also the country where I had the most singularly harrowing bus experience of my life. It happened on a trip from Madrid to the Southern port city of Cadiz. About halfway through the journey, the flat, straight roads are interrupted by a narrow belt of scrubby hills and steep, rocky ravines that the road winds its way through before coming out into more arid chaparral. I was sitting in the second row of seats behind the driver staring out the window as the final rays of sun disappeared over distant, sandy hills when a silver Mercedes cut us off. The driver slammed on his breaks, narrowly avoiding rear-ending the other car and released a string of expletives that involved a lot of profanitying on things like mothers and grandmothers and other distant female relations of the Merc driver. There was a moment of panic that quickly passed as the Mercedes sped up and our conductor eased off the break. Then something funny happened. Our driver sped up as well. Foot to the floor, he whipped around sharp curves and flew through narrow straightaways apparently pursuing the poor soul who had made the mistake of cutting him off. As we neared the Mercedes again, the conductor swiped on his high beams and laid on his horn, illuminating a woman in the back seat who had turned to look back and frozen in terror like a deer about to become venison. We came within inches of the other car and still our conductor persisted with his horn. I could see the terrified woman in the back seat screaming at the driver of the Mercedes to speed up or slow down or apologize or God only knows what else. Without warning, our conductor swerved into the left lane, and punched the gas. He flew by his opponent and cut him off with one fatal crank of the steering wheel throwing his arm out the window and shaking his fist in victory.
Just like that, he slowed down, turned off his high beams and everything returned to normal. Stunned, I took a deep breath, wiped my sweaty palms on my jeans and looked around at my other passengers, hoping to find some acknowledgement of the insanity we had all just experienced. Some munched happily on Serrano ham sandwiches, others dozed and many gave each other knowing looks and nodded in agreement. “He shouldn’t have cut off a bus driver…”
Which brings me back, more or less, to the question of trust. The famous statistic is that many more people die while driving than while flying, which is supposed to make me feel better about flying. It doesn’t though, because the worst part about air travel isn’t rocketing through the air like a bird, it’s having to trust someone I’ve never met to get me into and out of the sky in a semi-controlled fashion. I wouldn’t worry about flying if I were behind the controls or, perhaps wearing blue and red tights with a big S printed on my chest. But I don’t like explicitly putting my safety in the hands of people I don’t know. At best, I tolerate it. I can fly by telling myself that the pilots aren’t drunk or fresh out of making bombing runs from the USS whatever and I can use buses because I know that no one has more to lose than a driver who gets in a wreck.
Sitting on that bus in Uruguay, I remembered a similar experience in San Jose, Costa Rica where I was going to see a friend one afternoon. I had asked the bus driver in polite, heavily accented, mostly butchered Spanish if he could advise me when we got to a certain stop.
“No te preocupes,” he assured me.
So I didn’t preocuparme, until an hour later, when I found myself at the exact spot that I had gotten on the bus. He turned around and shrugged, opening the door for me to get out and try my luck with someone a bit more compassionate.
So that was running through my head in Montevideo, squinting out of dark windows, trying to make out familiar landmarks, already beginning to curse the silent conductor for having forgotten me. Then he turned around.
“Flaco! La próxima es tuya.”
Slightly surprised, I snatched up my bag and got to the door as quickly as I could, lest he deem that I was taking too long and drive on to the next stop. As I walked through the double doors into the chilly night, I turned back and thanked him. He looked at me with an indecipherable expression, shrugged as if to say: “What did you expect? I’m a bus driver.” then slammed the doors shut and roared off into the night.
Conversations with Savages
Every time I spend more than a holiday in a foreign country, there comes an inevitable moment when reality finally hits home and the last of the romantic notions that I once harboured about that nation expire quietly, gasping and anaemic like someone suffering through the fatal throws of emphysema. It’s the moment in which my prejudices are laid bare and I’m belted across the face with the realization that I’m neither as smart nor as cosmopolitan as I like to think I am. It feels like rock bottom, bitter like swallowing bile.
My friend Virginia celebrated her 20th birthday in the traditional Uruguayan manner. She and her mother made pizzas and empanadas, then invited friends and family over to pass the afternoon eating, reminiscing and drinking mate. When she’s not studying to become a high school literature teacher or giving classes to underprivileged youths, Virginia lives with her parents, sister and two brothers in a small, three-bedroom house in Toledo, a dormitory city of Montevideo. By Uruguayan standards it’s a working class neighbourhood – dirt roads, small ranch houses, everything is built from either concrete or cinder blocks or a combination of the two; there is no landscaping except periodic lawn maintenance entrusted to grazing animals. By the standards of anyone from the first world, it’s a slum.
The party was full of diverse characters, and most of my close Uruguayan friends were in attendance. These were people who had all but adopted me as their younger, clueless brother even though I had only spent a few months in their country. They showed me around, corrected my Spanish, helped me find an apartment and generally kept me out of trouble. Even though it was Sunday afternoon, it wasn’t easy for everyone to get off work, but they had all managed. Rafael the journalist greeted me with a big hug. Behind him was Hector, who works early morning shifts at a bakery and moonlights as a tattoo artist when he’s not helping to build houses at the co-op where he lives. His girlfriend, Marianella, who came with a big pizza, is studying primary education while teaching dance classes with a local NGO. Sebastian was late as always. He works nights as a systems analyst in order to support his son and be able to study Design during the day. We all sat outside eating, drinking, talking story and enjoying the last rays of mottled, late summer sunlight as it sank behind the eucalyptus grove across the street.
On my way home that night I ran into an American acquaintance named Mike, a Californian in Uruguay on a Fulbright scholarship to study popular music. He was headed out to dinner with a group of young English and Canadian travellers who were on a shoestring tour of Latin America. The two English girls looked perpetually bored and stank of patchouli. Every time they spoke, they squinted wistfully off into the distance, a gesture apparently meant to connote deep meaning. They seemed so intent on appearing worldly that they threatened to float away into pure spiritual transcendence at any moment.
Mike invited me to come. I wasn’t very hungry, but I appreciated their friendliness, plus, there are few greater pleasures than socializing in your own tongue after extended periods of butchering someone else’s. I tagged along with them to restaurant called el Diablito, known for its large selection of empanadas.
As is so often the case at these sorts of traveller’s get-togethers, the group ended up talking about one of the only things we all had in common, travelling – places we had visited, things we had seen and how deeply impacting and life affirming it had all been. As I squinted through the reeking, eye-watering haze of patchouli, and threadbare, backpacker’s clichés, snatches of disjointed conversation drifted across the table.
“Yeaaaa, man, we lived for two months in Receef – you know, Northern Brazil…”
“…Afro rhythms really speak to me…”
“…different pace of life…yea, man…”
I was having trouble making much sense of any of it and entire situation was beginning to have a strangely stupefying effect on me. I felt like I was being sucked into a world where criticism was not aloud and everything was always just groovy, man. Suddenly, a sentence jumped out of the void and roused me from my travel-story induced lethargy.
“The poor people here are so happy, even though they have nothing. I just want to be close to that.”
I had heard that one many, many times before. It is often repeated like some sort of half-cocked mantra by the armies of young backpackers currently infesting every hotel, pension and hostel between Tijuana and Patagonia. They are everywhere – late teens to early thirties, liberal-artsy type people who care about things like carbon footprints, destruction of the rainforests, Tibet, animal rights and any other moral crusade which can easily fit onto a bumper sticker or t-shirt. They are American, Canadian, British or Australian, dressed self-consciously casual in expensive clothes made to look like inexpensive clothes, and usually on some sort of sojourn of self-discovery. Regardless of where they are from or where they have been, 99.9% say the same thing, almost to the word, about the poor people they have come in contact with in the region – “They have so little, but they are so happy.” Then they smile smugly, reflecting on the deep insight that they have bestowed on their less worldly brethren and begin rolling another joint.
Before I had even set foot in Latin America, I had heard about the famous Alegría Latina. I used to think that large populations of jolly indigents (between 35% and 40% of Latin Americans live below the poverty line, depending on who you ask) lived out their lives in a state of lazy, ignorant satisfaction in Whoville-esqe ghettos that lined the well-travelled backpacking routes throughout the entire region. The way they were described to me, I imagined noble savages retrofitted for the 21st century with Levis in place of loincloths, and big, toothless grins replacing stoic, painted faces. I used to day dream that, one day in what would undoubtedly be a life full of travel and adventure, I would be able to “meet the natives” and share some of their vibes.
For a long time, this was my idea of the ultimate, authentic travel experience. As a kid who growing up with plenty of material comforts, experiencing other people’s poverty had a strangely life-affirming allure. It was like going to the zoo and jumping in the gorilla enclosure. In my mind, people who dealt with the problems associated with having little or no money lived a more “real” or “legitimate” life than I did in my cushy, white bread utopia. Every young traveller alive knows that in order to really experience the third world, you have to at least make an effort with the Savages. Otherwise, you’re not getting the full, soul searching, life defining, anti-consumerism experience that Latin America offers, nay – owes you.
Suddenly, talking to those English girls, it dawned on me that my friends in Uruguay were the noble savages that everyone loves so much. What’s more, not only did I know these people, I had actually attended one of their primitive poverty parties that very afternoon. My gut reaction was one of smug superiority. I was living the traveller’s dream: the ultimate cultural insider seeing the “real Latin America” through the eyes of the natives. How intrepid, how wonderfully slummy! I would have to tell all of the less worldly people I knew that even though my little Uruguayan buddies were broker than a bad joke, they were still able to take time off from their meagre jobs to celebrate a friend’s birthday over pizza and beer on a Sunday afternoon. It was classic. This kind of person doesn’t mind skipping work, he doesn’t care about money – he doesn’t even need it. He subsists off dignity, happiness, and good vibes.
Smiling inwardly, I sat there and tried to think back to any instances when my friends had demonstrated that magical Alegría. Instead, and to my growing unease, all I could remember was a conversation I had had with Virginia about whether or not she was going to attend a certain function later in the week.
“I can’t,” she said, slightly irritated. “My dad and my sister will be working, my brothers will be at school and my mom will be running errands. I’ll have to stay with the house.”
What did she mean, “stay with the house”?
She looked at me like an idiot. “You know -- stay with the house! Someone always has to be in the house, because otherwise people will rob you! That’s how it is in my neighbourhood.”
No Alegría there, then – no upside to the constant fear of grand larceny.
“Considering how they live, they are so up-beat,” One of the Canadians, gushed. Well, yes, I supposed that was theoretically true, but there was a queasiness in my guts. Considering they live in neighbourhoods overrun by trash, drugs and crime. Considering they can’t get well paying jobs, can’t get good educations and can’t get good health care. Considering that, unless they get caught dealing drugs, robbing or killing they usually can’t even get the rest of their society to admit that they exist. Yes, they are “up-beat”. But in situations like these, how many options do you really have? Existentialism and ennui are the privileges of people who don’t need to worry about their children getting enough to eat.
“They aren’t caught up with materialism,” Insisted one of the English girls, emphasizing the last word like an epithet. “I have friends and family in London with great jobs, posh flats, nice cars, everything. But they’re not happy. They’re lives are still missing something.”
Hector, an unfailing friendly and positive person once showed me around the neighbourhood where he grew up. It’s a mix of small yet sturdy ranch houses and hastily constructed, decidedly less sturdy shanties located a stone’s throw from the wealthiest neighbourhoods in Montevideo but separated by imaginary lines that will cut you into pieces should you try to cross them. Depending on how the wind blows, the entire area is filled with the spicy, vaguely sweet odour of putrefying cow carcasses wafting from a large meat processing plant. As we walked, we talked about his life. Among his many skills, he is a classically trained guitarist and has studied music theory. I asked him why he had stopped.
“Because I…well…” To this day, this is the only time I have ever seen him look embarrassed. “Because I had to start working – we needed the money.”
That’s how it is.
I guess even Savages need money. Music theory …that took me off guard. I couldn’t imagine there being much mindless grinning involved.
Back at dinner, in the company of more worldly young people, conversation drifted to which beaches in Brazil were the best for travellers, especially in the state of “Receef” as one of the girls insisted on calling it. My mind was on other things. Disillusion mixed with a strong dose of guilt had begun to set in and a dark thought occurred to me:
What if Virgina or Rafael or Hector or Sebastian were each born with lots of money, but without legs? Would wealthy foreigners still smile at them as if they were little children and say: “Oh, look at you! Even though you’re disabled, you’re still so up-beat.”? Would people still want to be close to their semi-divine, Legless Alegría? These were not easy, or comfortable questions for anyone, especially me. I decided not to mention them.
When the food came, everyone had their own plate, which is rare in Uruguay. To generalize a bit, Uruguayans are an intensely social people who like to share food as a matter of custom. Many cherish the tradition of taking a hunk of meat straight off the barbecue and cutting it into bite-sized pieces or passing around a big bottle of beer and drinking it communally. Personally, it drives me nuts.
One day I mentioned this to Sebastian, a man who will literally offer you a bite of anything he is eating – including sandwiches, ice cream cones, and tiny pieces of gum that he will break into two or three even tinier pieces.
“I never share food,” I said.
“Why not?” he looked at me like something was growing out of my head.
“I don’t know, its just not something I like to do…” I was about to go on to explain how my older brother and father had always tortured me by taking food off my plate in the interest of “tasting” something when he stopped me with four words.
“You’ve never gone hungry.”
“…”
That’s the way it is.
“How many countries have you been to?” asked someone at the table in a way that reminded me of excited boy scouts discussing merit badges. I had to stop and make a mental list, and even then forgot a couple. Everyone at the table had lists bigger than mine. If we combined our frequent flyer miles, we could have flown to Mars.
Can’t say the same for my company earlier that day. Savages don’t travel. They love their homes and their communities; which is to say nothing for their deep, sometimes spiritual connection to the land. Or so the stories go.
“I would leave tomorrow and travel the world if I had the chance,” Rafael told me once. “Yea, I love Uruguay, but who wouldn’t want to see other places?”
He had lived in the United States for two years with an uncle, but despite intelligence, work ethic and education, was unable to stay legally. Many times, when Savages go to countries in the first world, they lose their “Noble” status and turn into plain old Wet-Backs, Dirty Mexicans or Sudacas, as the Spanish like to call them. Uruguay doesn’t have many exchange courses, or scholarships, or volunteer organizations like the ones that send young, bright-eyed first world college graduates to South America. Opportunities for travel tend to run just one direction. Backpacking trails lead many people into Latin America, but very rarely lead them out.
That’s the way it is.
For them at least. As for me and the rest of the young people who sat at that table eating dinner: we’ll always have our own plates, locks on our doors, and enough money to allow us to study or travel or be most anything we put our minds to. Perhaps it’s no surprise then that when we are confronted with poverty, sometimes we see what we want to see despite, or perhaps because of all our good intentions.
I dropped some pesos on the table and made some sort of excuse to get out of there. When I got outside, my first instinct was to call Virginia and say, I didn’t know what. I’m sorry? For what? For being able to return to my warm, safe, upper-middle class suburban American home while you can’t leave your house for fear of it being robbed? I had my phone in my hand, I was mashing in sappy, nonsensical text confessions, I was apologizing for everything I could think of…but in the end, I didn’t pressed “send”. Instead, I put my phone in my pocket and began the long walk back to my apartment through the deserted, tree-lined streets of Montevideo. My guilt wasn’t worth a damned thing to any of my friends, I realized. They didn’t need my pity and they definitely didn’t need my condescension. They had more important things to worry about trying to make their way in a world that often isn’t very interested in letting them be more than just grinning, happy Savages.
Article published in the august issue of
My friend Virginia celebrated her 20th birthday in the traditional Uruguayan manner. She and her mother made pizzas and empanadas, then invited friends and family over to pass the afternoon eating, reminiscing and drinking mate. When she’s not studying to become a high school literature teacher or giving classes to underprivileged youths, Virginia lives with her parents, sister and two brothers in a small, three-bedroom house in Toledo, a dormitory city of Montevideo. By Uruguayan standards it’s a working class neighbourhood – dirt roads, small ranch houses, everything is built from either concrete or cinder blocks or a combination of the two; there is no landscaping except periodic lawn maintenance entrusted to grazing animals. By the standards of anyone from the first world, it’s a slum.
The party was full of diverse characters, and most of my close Uruguayan friends were in attendance. These were people who had all but adopted me as their younger, clueless brother even though I had only spent a few months in their country. They showed me around, corrected my Spanish, helped me find an apartment and generally kept me out of trouble. Even though it was Sunday afternoon, it wasn’t easy for everyone to get off work, but they had all managed. Rafael the journalist greeted me with a big hug. Behind him was Hector, who works early morning shifts at a bakery and moonlights as a tattoo artist when he’s not helping to build houses at the co-op where he lives. His girlfriend, Marianella, who came with a big pizza, is studying primary education while teaching dance classes with a local NGO. Sebastian was late as always. He works nights as a systems analyst in order to support his son and be able to study Design during the day. We all sat outside eating, drinking, talking story and enjoying the last rays of mottled, late summer sunlight as it sank behind the eucalyptus grove across the street.
On my way home that night I ran into an American acquaintance named Mike, a Californian in Uruguay on a Fulbright scholarship to study popular music. He was headed out to dinner with a group of young English and Canadian travellers who were on a shoestring tour of Latin America. The two English girls looked perpetually bored and stank of patchouli. Every time they spoke, they squinted wistfully off into the distance, a gesture apparently meant to connote deep meaning. They seemed so intent on appearing worldly that they threatened to float away into pure spiritual transcendence at any moment.
Mike invited me to come. I wasn’t very hungry, but I appreciated their friendliness, plus, there are few greater pleasures than socializing in your own tongue after extended periods of butchering someone else’s. I tagged along with them to restaurant called el Diablito, known for its large selection of empanadas.
As is so often the case at these sorts of traveller’s get-togethers, the group ended up talking about one of the only things we all had in common, travelling – places we had visited, things we had seen and how deeply impacting and life affirming it had all been. As I squinted through the reeking, eye-watering haze of patchouli, and threadbare, backpacker’s clichés, snatches of disjointed conversation drifted across the table.
“Yeaaaa, man, we lived for two months in Receef – you know, Northern Brazil…”
“…Afro rhythms really speak to me…”
“…different pace of life…yea, man…”
I was having trouble making much sense of any of it and entire situation was beginning to have a strangely stupefying effect on me. I felt like I was being sucked into a world where criticism was not aloud and everything was always just groovy, man. Suddenly, a sentence jumped out of the void and roused me from my travel-story induced lethargy.
“The poor people here are so happy, even though they have nothing. I just want to be close to that.”
I had heard that one many, many times before. It is often repeated like some sort of half-cocked mantra by the armies of young backpackers currently infesting every hotel, pension and hostel between Tijuana and Patagonia. They are everywhere – late teens to early thirties, liberal-artsy type people who care about things like carbon footprints, destruction of the rainforests, Tibet, animal rights and any other moral crusade which can easily fit onto a bumper sticker or t-shirt. They are American, Canadian, British or Australian, dressed self-consciously casual in expensive clothes made to look like inexpensive clothes, and usually on some sort of sojourn of self-discovery. Regardless of where they are from or where they have been, 99.9% say the same thing, almost to the word, about the poor people they have come in contact with in the region – “They have so little, but they are so happy.” Then they smile smugly, reflecting on the deep insight that they have bestowed on their less worldly brethren and begin rolling another joint.
Before I had even set foot in Latin America, I had heard about the famous Alegría Latina. I used to think that large populations of jolly indigents (between 35% and 40% of Latin Americans live below the poverty line, depending on who you ask) lived out their lives in a state of lazy, ignorant satisfaction in Whoville-esqe ghettos that lined the well-travelled backpacking routes throughout the entire region. The way they were described to me, I imagined noble savages retrofitted for the 21st century with Levis in place of loincloths, and big, toothless grins replacing stoic, painted faces. I used to day dream that, one day in what would undoubtedly be a life full of travel and adventure, I would be able to “meet the natives” and share some of their vibes.
For a long time, this was my idea of the ultimate, authentic travel experience. As a kid who growing up with plenty of material comforts, experiencing other people’s poverty had a strangely life-affirming allure. It was like going to the zoo and jumping in the gorilla enclosure. In my mind, people who dealt with the problems associated with having little or no money lived a more “real” or “legitimate” life than I did in my cushy, white bread utopia. Every young traveller alive knows that in order to really experience the third world, you have to at least make an effort with the Savages. Otherwise, you’re not getting the full, soul searching, life defining, anti-consumerism experience that Latin America offers, nay – owes you.
Suddenly, talking to those English girls, it dawned on me that my friends in Uruguay were the noble savages that everyone loves so much. What’s more, not only did I know these people, I had actually attended one of their primitive poverty parties that very afternoon. My gut reaction was one of smug superiority. I was living the traveller’s dream: the ultimate cultural insider seeing the “real Latin America” through the eyes of the natives. How intrepid, how wonderfully slummy! I would have to tell all of the less worldly people I knew that even though my little Uruguayan buddies were broker than a bad joke, they were still able to take time off from their meagre jobs to celebrate a friend’s birthday over pizza and beer on a Sunday afternoon. It was classic. This kind of person doesn’t mind skipping work, he doesn’t care about money – he doesn’t even need it. He subsists off dignity, happiness, and good vibes.
Smiling inwardly, I sat there and tried to think back to any instances when my friends had demonstrated that magical Alegría. Instead, and to my growing unease, all I could remember was a conversation I had had with Virginia about whether or not she was going to attend a certain function later in the week.
“I can’t,” she said, slightly irritated. “My dad and my sister will be working, my brothers will be at school and my mom will be running errands. I’ll have to stay with the house.”
What did she mean, “stay with the house”?
She looked at me like an idiot. “You know -- stay with the house! Someone always has to be in the house, because otherwise people will rob you! That’s how it is in my neighbourhood.”
No Alegría there, then – no upside to the constant fear of grand larceny.
“Considering how they live, they are so up-beat,” One of the Canadians, gushed. Well, yes, I supposed that was theoretically true, but there was a queasiness in my guts. Considering they live in neighbourhoods overrun by trash, drugs and crime. Considering they can’t get well paying jobs, can’t get good educations and can’t get good health care. Considering that, unless they get caught dealing drugs, robbing or killing they usually can’t even get the rest of their society to admit that they exist. Yes, they are “up-beat”. But in situations like these, how many options do you really have? Existentialism and ennui are the privileges of people who don’t need to worry about their children getting enough to eat.
“They aren’t caught up with materialism,” Insisted one of the English girls, emphasizing the last word like an epithet. “I have friends and family in London with great jobs, posh flats, nice cars, everything. But they’re not happy. They’re lives are still missing something.”
Hector, an unfailing friendly and positive person once showed me around the neighbourhood where he grew up. It’s a mix of small yet sturdy ranch houses and hastily constructed, decidedly less sturdy shanties located a stone’s throw from the wealthiest neighbourhoods in Montevideo but separated by imaginary lines that will cut you into pieces should you try to cross them. Depending on how the wind blows, the entire area is filled with the spicy, vaguely sweet odour of putrefying cow carcasses wafting from a large meat processing plant. As we walked, we talked about his life. Among his many skills, he is a classically trained guitarist and has studied music theory. I asked him why he had stopped.
“Because I…well…” To this day, this is the only time I have ever seen him look embarrassed. “Because I had to start working – we needed the money.”
That’s how it is.
I guess even Savages need money. Music theory …that took me off guard. I couldn’t imagine there being much mindless grinning involved.
Back at dinner, in the company of more worldly young people, conversation drifted to which beaches in Brazil were the best for travellers, especially in the state of “Receef” as one of the girls insisted on calling it. My mind was on other things. Disillusion mixed with a strong dose of guilt had begun to set in and a dark thought occurred to me:
What if Virgina or Rafael or Hector or Sebastian were each born with lots of money, but without legs? Would wealthy foreigners still smile at them as if they were little children and say: “Oh, look at you! Even though you’re disabled, you’re still so up-beat.”? Would people still want to be close to their semi-divine, Legless Alegría? These were not easy, or comfortable questions for anyone, especially me. I decided not to mention them.
When the food came, everyone had their own plate, which is rare in Uruguay. To generalize a bit, Uruguayans are an intensely social people who like to share food as a matter of custom. Many cherish the tradition of taking a hunk of meat straight off the barbecue and cutting it into bite-sized pieces or passing around a big bottle of beer and drinking it communally. Personally, it drives me nuts.
One day I mentioned this to Sebastian, a man who will literally offer you a bite of anything he is eating – including sandwiches, ice cream cones, and tiny pieces of gum that he will break into two or three even tinier pieces.
“I never share food,” I said.
“Why not?” he looked at me like something was growing out of my head.
“I don’t know, its just not something I like to do…” I was about to go on to explain how my older brother and father had always tortured me by taking food off my plate in the interest of “tasting” something when he stopped me with four words.
“You’ve never gone hungry.”
“…”
That’s the way it is.
“How many countries have you been to?” asked someone at the table in a way that reminded me of excited boy scouts discussing merit badges. I had to stop and make a mental list, and even then forgot a couple. Everyone at the table had lists bigger than mine. If we combined our frequent flyer miles, we could have flown to Mars.
Can’t say the same for my company earlier that day. Savages don’t travel. They love their homes and their communities; which is to say nothing for their deep, sometimes spiritual connection to the land. Or so the stories go.
“I would leave tomorrow and travel the world if I had the chance,” Rafael told me once. “Yea, I love Uruguay, but who wouldn’t want to see other places?”
He had lived in the United States for two years with an uncle, but despite intelligence, work ethic and education, was unable to stay legally. Many times, when Savages go to countries in the first world, they lose their “Noble” status and turn into plain old Wet-Backs, Dirty Mexicans or Sudacas, as the Spanish like to call them. Uruguay doesn’t have many exchange courses, or scholarships, or volunteer organizations like the ones that send young, bright-eyed first world college graduates to South America. Opportunities for travel tend to run just one direction. Backpacking trails lead many people into Latin America, but very rarely lead them out.
That’s the way it is.
For them at least. As for me and the rest of the young people who sat at that table eating dinner: we’ll always have our own plates, locks on our doors, and enough money to allow us to study or travel or be most anything we put our minds to. Perhaps it’s no surprise then that when we are confronted with poverty, sometimes we see what we want to see despite, or perhaps because of all our good intentions.
I dropped some pesos on the table and made some sort of excuse to get out of there. When I got outside, my first instinct was to call Virginia and say, I didn’t know what. I’m sorry? For what? For being able to return to my warm, safe, upper-middle class suburban American home while you can’t leave your house for fear of it being robbed? I had my phone in my hand, I was mashing in sappy, nonsensical text confessions, I was apologizing for everything I could think of…but in the end, I didn’t pressed “send”. Instead, I put my phone in my pocket and began the long walk back to my apartment through the deserted, tree-lined streets of Montevideo. My guilt wasn’t worth a damned thing to any of my friends, I realized. They didn’t need my pity and they definitely didn’t need my condescension. They had more important things to worry about trying to make their way in a world that often isn’t very interested in letting them be more than just grinning, happy Savages.
Article published in the august issue of
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