The Write Thing

Yesterday, I woke up in the small hours of the morning and was unable to fall back into sleep. Maybe it was the excitement of a busy weekend, in which I ran (or briskly walked my way through) my first 5K race and I almost blew a car tire when I added pressure to it — can anybody explain to me why in America, a country where even orgasms are digital, there is not a single tire pressure monitor with a regular display? Even Third-World Argentina has one, for God’s sakes!
Back to the exciting weekend. Well after my near-death experience, I had an appointment with two extremes of Superbowl celebration. One was an invitation from a work colleague, who is married to Jack, an artist here in Houston, and the other was a party with the office boys (age range: mid-twenties to late fifties) at a local bar, drinking beer and rooting for the Cardinals, the team that ended up losing an incredible game that I only understood 10% of.
So I arrive at 4.45 pm at the first party, which took place in another couple’s house, a fabulous and spacious two-story construction designed in a state-of-the-art fashion by the husband, a famous architect in town. The house is part of the art tour of the Heights, the hip and bohemian area of this city that would surprise the most skeptical visitors. I take my own little tour of the house, guided by my friend and one of the guests, the wondrous Loretta, a Croatian concert pianist that had drunk too many “fogs” — the infamous mysterious drink the party is named after. As an aside, after the tour, Loretta and I will agree that the closet in the main bedroom deserves a tour of its own — how can anyone be so tidy? Probably it’s an architect thing…

The party unfolds and I am introduced to most of the patrons of the arts in Houston, Museum directors, Film festival organizers, and the like. At one point, 62-year-old Botoxed Mary asks me what is my artistic specialty, and I start my speech on working for an oil and gas consulting firm. I can tell she is appalled and I only then realize that I should have lied…but she is too drunk to even get worried about my secular status, and I can always interject and say I used to be an amateur opera singer. That seems to relieve her while she looks at my neck and tells me I look so good for my age, as if I were in my mid-seventies. It dawns on me just then how much age matters in some circles…the reality of it becomes a burden and many feel compelled to find some surgical solution to the woe of growing old. At least Mary does look awesome at 62, although I personally think that has more to do with her post-menopause sexual drive than with the benefits of lifting and laser procedures — after all, she quite promptly tells me her man is nine years younger and that they go at it for hours.

In the sitting room we meet John, relaxing on the huge circular couch and sipping something as he quietly watches the game. When my friend asks him where he knows the host and hostess from, he simply says he saw there was a party going on, and he thought he might join in. I still think he was telling us the truth…Anyway, we are now halftime through the game. Now women want to pump up the volume and listen to the commercials and Bruce Springsteen is about to give a mini-performance. Venus and Mars, boys and girls, is a combination that never fails. Boys watch the game, women watch the commercials, but they all watch the Boss.

Taking my cue from the halftime call, I focus on keeping a ying-yang synchrony in my own reading of America’s biggest night event after Thanksgiving, and I leave for the Big Woodrow’s in Chimney Rock and Richmond Avenue, where my boys are hanging out. They are at a table outside, enjoying the weather in a mild Sunday evening and watching the LCD screens give a partial victory to the Steelers. As I arrive, the Steelers’ luck will change, and the Cardinals’ touchdown just a minute before the end of the game will light my workmates’ eyes with a glimmer of hope. A brief moment of joy. Only seconds later, the ghost of a tight victory vanishes before their eyes, as a yellow-clad boy holds the ball inside the court in a fantastic acrobatic move worthy of a ballet performance. The game is now irreversibly lost for the Cardinals, and hope gives way to a little frustration, although nobody is passionate enough in my eclectic group to get into a heated after-match argument — which I am secretly grateful for.

We all get into our cars and drive home. The night is over early in America, and I am in bed by 10.30…only to wake up a few hours later and amuse myself with the memory of a weekend to remember.

Halloween. Wikipedia decorates its description with the legend of Stingy Jack. It is a night that many children may have used to offer a trick- or-treat promise on alerted neighbors ready to meet the traditional demands. It is a night for playing, even when tradition is nowhere to be found in a DNA that is carved straight from the Pampas, where everything grows to look just as plain as barren land.

It was my night for literature. A group of shining knights in armor with a literary sword decided to organize a cultural soirée, reading short stories written by one of them in candlelight. We were entertained with a good lentils broth (or stew, for that matter, I’ll never know what to call it for sure), some pot-smoking and literature. My two escorts — beautiful ladies with a coincidental birth date — looked excited to be there, and so was I, enjoying a little bit of hippie life after a Doris Day hiatus. The stories were not really good, or perhaps it is simply the fact that the whole idea of oral transmission of literature is a double-edged sword, exposing the flaws of a story that does not flow all the more bluntly. It does not matter. It made me want to write about this Halloween night, which in my French days of yore I arbitrarily baptized with the heading that crowns this posting.

Halloween is a good set of instructions to abide by in a cool spring evening. Last year, at Halloween, I was in Rome, absorbing and saying goodbye to Europe as I once knew it. Today my Jack -O- Lantern is blind, and I like to feel that it can start anew. It is a night to breathe, to fuck, to pretend that the next day means something different, to feel the smell of a strange skin in the heat of a capricious, one-night fire. A night to lie to ourselves, consciously, for there will be a morning, but we will have left her room stealthily in the small hours, long before we could remember the contours of her face, or recognize — were we ever to hear it again — the sound of her voice as she called a fictitious, ghostly name.

Two weekends in a row of birthday parties. First, that of a dead man whose work is universally acknowledged among the greatest in world literature. Barrio Norte, Buenos Aires. Selected crowd of guests, some of them rather prominent. My role was to accompany someone else, which is rather interesting when the milieu is foreign. It helps to create impressions and, I must confess, I sometimes can thrive on that. It is external passivity taken to the most active internalization of surroundings, people, manners, behaviors and — of course — food.

I like these gatherings where people really do not have a purpose to be there, but they are. Some were there to celebrate l’anniversaire de l’absent whereas most simply wanted to pay due homage to the hostess and continue to be in her radar. A song starts to play as the party draws to a close and the moment to cut the cake arrives: Pink Floyd’s The Wall. The man apparently liked it a lot, once more confirming — as if it were necessary — how simple literary genius can sometimes be. White cake, white frosting with a touch of coconut and dulce de leche, really good, even while I did not have any, only indulged in watching my valkyrie eat her small piece. And off we went, having mingled with a variety of characters that ranged from the most ridiculous to the most interesting (the last group, unfortunately, was rather scanty). The hostess preserves the tradition and the memory of her love for that man unblemished. He probably would have enjoyed the irony of death as he was being wined and dined in absentia.

The weekend after. Las Cañitas, my own birthday. I went through the details, the organization, and enjoyed it, for the first time in my life. I recognize my own behavior as a sign of growth. People I love and cherish, people whose friendship I value with a certainty that only deep feelings can award, were there to laugh and cheer as the day progressed into the shadow of its own cyclical renaissance, leaving me with a new definitive number from which I should be drawing a life for the next 365 days of my existence. I have plans, I am being born again into and out of myself. First inside, where it all lies. Then outside, to enjoy the world, breathe life into a wiser soul and thank the mystery of existence for shining some light along the way, and bringing her to me in her splendor. It really feels like happiness.