At work on Saturday Ramiro invited me to La Farandula the next day, now yesterday. I said I was interested but that I had never been to La Farandula. In the ensuing Saturday night pinballing between the front of the restaurant and the kitchen I asked others if they knew La Farandula. I misunderstood it was in Seaside. People said that there was no place in Seaside where they did shows, much less one named "La Farandula." It turns out a farandula is, as Victor explained to me, the venue where all the big stars perform, the performance. On Sunday it was to be in Gilroy. I gave Ramiro, henceforth known as a Choco, my phone number when I left the restaurant as he was plastic-sealing fish for sous vide preparation. I would be in Seaside where I host an open mic on Sundays, ready about ten. He would pick me up and then we'd get José, henceforth known as Chepe, and then we'd go to el show in Gilroy. I was excited.
I had also planned to play bocce with Kyle on Sunday, in the afternoon, before the open mic. We worked out the logistics on Saturday when Kyle was working as a food runner. I gave him my phone number on the other half of the paper that I gave to Choco. Kyle would come to the open mic as well, taking advantage of his night off. We met at 4 and played to 12 points, with Kyle winning. Then we decided to go to 15, and I won. We called it a tie.
During the game I was anticipating a phone call from Victor who would be getting off from his other dishwasher job at a family establishment downtown that is generally known as the place with really big cakes. I gave him my phone number on a scrap of paper weeks before on a similar Saturday at the restaurant so he could start some English lessons with me. It has been hella busy on Sundays at the family establishment downtown that is generally known as the place with really big cakes, and he has not been able to call me before six when I have to be at the café to set up the open mic. I stopped by the place with really big cakes and luckily a server was out the side employee entrance finishing a cigarette. I caught her before she went back in and asked if Victor was still working. She said she didn't know all their names as there are so many (that work in the kitchen). She went down the stairs to inquire and I heard "a guero is outside looking for Victor," and a nice man came out who I addressed in Spanish and who informed me that Victor left at 3 and was coming back again at 6. He gave a bemused smile when I said something like "but this is impossible!" Of the two nights he doesn't work at his other job he has to come back to work again on the same day for his day job? OK, thank you, I said, and got on my bicycle to go to Seaside to host the open mic.
Halfway there, at the bottleneck created by the Naval Postgraduate School where only Del Monte Avenue, the bike path and the beach run between the ocean and the barbed-wire fenced military academic institution, I recognized Victor coming the other way in his FOX hat (yellow and white double spotlight logo, black material) and I flagged him down, turned my bike around and rode with him a little bit. He did not look happy. Did you get to take a nap at least? I tried to ask. Just enough time to clean up and turn back around, I am presently paraphrasing and translating. It sucks because I want to learn English, I am flagrantly translating emotion and my perception of it into the very colloquial speech that is the thwarted goal in question. We calculated a future moment to host a future lesson. I said goodbye and turned around.
I brought a bottle of rosé from Grocery Outlet to the bocce game, along with two mugs. When I got to the lake on the other side of the freeway I poured another mugful and paused to watch a few dozen small black birds dive at the surface of the water and fly back up into the air over and over with the 6 lanes of freeway merging traffic on the other side. There was sour apple on the nose, unripe strawberry on the front and a lemonade tartness lingering at the back of the taste. Really it just tasted like unsweet lemonade. It was 4 dollars. Whatever.
Though I don't really want to get into it right now, an open mic could be a fantastic vehicle for a story. Diverse contingents coming together sincerely expressing themselves, making friends, hurting each other's feelings, etc. I once wrote a story that centered on a night of karaoke at Chopsticks 2: the How Can Be Lounge, a place I would go to all the time in Portland. It was called "Singing the Song of Someone Else." It sounds like a joke title for a New Yorker story. Perhaps I am giving myself too much credit. It sounds like a headline for a small town newspaper profile on the local karaoke bar. Whatever.
Seaside has a resident francophonic socialist rambler that mumbles loudly, always has a cane and a scarf, and attends the open mic with impeccable regularity. I appreciate his enthusiasm and respect his politics, and I even let him speechify for five minutes or so when he asks me nicely beforehand. His politics are much in line with the occupy movement and he calls our present political climate a "Mickey Mouse democracy." Is that a cliché already? I will google that at the next possible internet situation (I now have the internet and “Mickey Mouse Democracy” is not a cliché). Point is that Claude did not come to the open mic this week.
I got a phone call from Choco at 10:05 and said goodnight to the show, which by the end was everyone left following Tiffany, who began a "Goodbye, Andrew" song as I took my bike out the back door, to lock it across the street in front of La Tortuga where Ramiro was to pick me up. I left one mug and the empty bottle of rosé in my basket, not worried about either. I sent my friend Jaymee a text message referring to an art project she did 5 years ago where she agreed to be taken anywhere an acquaintance decided would be meaningful. The only person who took her up on the project was our friend Bill who made her climb a water tower. I asked her what the philosophical implications are of such a project.
Choco's 4 Runner pulled up and I got in the back—his tía was up front—coming with us to la farandula. We picked up Chepe, who I'd never seen out of his busser uniform, and we went to a gas station to get something to drink. I got a coffee in the mug I kept. Chepe bought it for me, another for himself, and 2 red bulls for Choco and tia. When we got back out to the car Choco gave me the keys and told me I was driving. Alright, I said in Spanish. Tía held my coffee.
This was the first time I had a particular mix of feelings since I was in the Dominican Republic, those of an outsider who, with a sense of irony, is being accepted. This irony is palpable in my speech, the stuffiness and awkwardness of my Spanish. The patience and respect showed to me and my bumbling along in Spanish is a special kind of love for which I am eternally grateful. To the people of the Dominican Republic: thank you for your kindness. This is not to say that the way that people treated me was not the patronizing maternal supervision that an adult would bestow upon a wayward child. I was respected, but also I was a cute foreigner with the vocabulary of a 7 year old. In other words, I frequently did not know exactly what was happening because I did not understand everything, but also because, out of pragmatism, I was not informed of everything, and I never knew exactly which it was—if I misunderstood, nodded to something I did not agree to, or if I was not consulted, figuring it would be best simply to show me what was happening as opposed to trying to explain it. Any independent action I took was always the subject of scrutiny, and not without good reason.
My point is, I don't know if I agreed unwittingly to being the designated driver for the evening, or if that was why I was enlisted in the journey, or how to say "designated driver" or if that's even in the lexicon. These were my thoughts, not "I drank a beer watching the European Championship final game with my folks this afternoon, then I had the greater half of a bottle of wine between 4 and 6 while playing bocce and commuting to Seaside, and then I had a beer while hosting the open mic. Honestly I had two, as is my compensation for hosting the thing, an allowance of 2 beers. It was now 11 PM.
I was merging on that same section of freeway when they were asking me about my job, and explained I got paid in beers and only then, when Chepe asked if I had a beer earlier, did I think, "shit! I have been drinking all day and now I am driving someone else's 4 Runner to Gilroy." ¿Estás bien? Chepe asked. I said I just had one. That I was fine, which I did believe, which anybody believes, which is another story. The point here has to do with the need to be accepted, to pretend like communicating in Spanish is easy, natural, not a constructed identity, a painful, embarrassing process of pretending.
Jaymee texted back to me at 10:30, I think the appeal is Surrender, Reliquishing control (& the freedom that can be paradoxically found by doing so). Gilroy!
I safely guided us across the Salinas River, through Castroville, over to Prunedale and onto the 101. I established with Choco that the steering wheel shaking was normal. I said it was like a massage for my hands. Chepe said that's good after the guitar playing. Agreed.
Passing San Juan Bautista the highway gets dark. I slowed down and pulled the stick that I turned on the lights with, thinking it was the brights. The music flickered and the car started acting funny. We crossed the Pajaro river and ended up in the Santa Clara Valley a few miles out of town, not yet the cherry stands that mark Gilroy's periphery. The pedal was responding strangely and I said so as best as I could. I was understood and Choco told me to pull over, so I did. He popped the hood and messed with some things with Chepe. I realized that the battery he said he had installed that day was in this car. I asked tía, still sitting next to me, where he learned about cars. He taught himself. The engine cut out and Choco and Chepe pushed us to a better spot further on.
Tía and I sat up front while Chepe and Choco called and texted people already at the show and others back in Monterey.
Jaymee had sent me another text, Our culture mandates that we always be on top of everything/have our shit together all the time. Letting go of that responsibility & giving it over to someone else could very well be considered a subversive act.
The humor in the situation was apparent. We talked to el viejo from work, a lovely and strange man always happy to riff with me at the restaurant, usually in English. He calls me Andrecito, the diminutive that the kitchen uses for the most part. I said to Choco to say hello for me. ¡¿Andrés está con ustedes?! he asked incredulously, like it was a joke.
Choco starting joking that this farandula, this event that he kept telling me he was going to take me to, was this. This was el show—the four of us parked next to the highway that divides the rolling dark hills between us and the ocean from the unseen fields of what is known as the Silicon Valley.
Andrés va a escribir en su diario...Choco began imagining, ¿Andrés tienes un diario? I said that I did in fact have a notebook that I had in my bag from the day before when I was getting ready to cover an event for the local paper that it turns out is not for another 3 weeks. Andrés va a escribir en su diario "este día yo fuí al show." This was hilarious to me, of course, because I try to write every day, generally about my own perceptions, and I vaguely had decided I would write about whatever happened this night, on this adventure to Gilroy, a town I only knew because you had to get through it to get to Morgan Hill which you have to get through to get to San Jose which you have to get to to get on a plane or go through to get to San Francisco or Oakland or anywhere really, a town that Joan Didion described as an agricultural town now "vanished...having reinvented itself as a sprawl of commuter subdivisions for San Jose and the tech industry.” Last 4th of July I drove there with friends to see fireworks.
Andrew is going to write in his diary, this day I went to the show.
Chepe got through to a friend who agreed to pick us up. He would be there in half an hour. It was already getting on midnight. The show would go to 1, maybe 1:30. As it turned out he had been working all day so we just piled into his car and went back. Choco would be back tomorrow with a new battery or transmission or whatever to pick up his 4 Runner. Chepe sat up front and chatted with his friend, and Choco and tía napped next to me in the back. They got dropped off first, then me at my bike in front of La Tortuga. I had to insist that I would be alright riding my bike alone late at night in the cold. It's like a car to me. I didn't want to leave it overnight, but was touched at their preoccupation for my wellbeing. Chepe gave me his sweatervest to wear for extra warmth. I would give it back Wednesday at work.
They watched me unlock my bike and put on the sweatervest and my helmet. They drove off, I got on my bike, and noticed that the mug was gone. Why would someone take a mug from my bike basket? The empty bottle of rosé was still there. I rode down the street and noticed a man walking with a cane and scarf. He sat down on a red bus stop bench. I stopped and said hello to Claude, asked why he didn't go to the open mic. He asked if I wanted a mug, looking guilty.
You took my mug, Claude! Right out of my bike basket?
This is America! You can't just leave something and expect somebody not to take it!
I know, I don't really need it. Do you want the mug, Claude? You can have it if you want it, no hard feelings.
I want the mug.
Alright, it's yours, Claude. Enjoy.
The mug has lots of animals anthropomorphized as young children at school, crawling over desks like the classroom is a jungle gym. The joys of teaching are without number, the mug says. Looked at cynically (kids=misbehavior=headache), it is a stupid mug. When one decides, however, that to really learn is to let yourself go entirely into the world of your teacher, and create a new one together, it is rather the opposite.
