Dumping Ground

When I'm in the crux, I can feel the braille of your thoughts on my skin.

Yet this stuff that I feel here billows,
breaking the gelatin contours
of our mother tongue.

On March 22, 1978 Karl Wallenda, patriarch of the fearless family of high wire walkers, dies after plunging to his death from a wire in San Juan, Puerto Rico. He was 73 years old.

El Condado, Beach front hotels, the wire tethered between them

“Life is being on the wire, everything else is just waiting.” – Karl Wallenda

My introduction to the legend of Karl Wallenda was simple enough: my mother told me about a circus man who had died after falling from between the two buildings we were walking by one day. Since then the image of this sky magician plummeting to his death with the gruesome grace of a shot dove stuck in my mind. As a Puerto Rican boy having grown up in the island and outside of it, the event and the solitary man as its protagonist has been archived in my mind for no apparent reason, like so many details that are sponged by our unconscious. Now that the event has been reactivated from my unconscious, I seek its meaning, I want to find the series of coincidences beyond the apparent facts that brought this strange and spectacular convergence to my neck of the tropical woods.

A Puerto Rican boy is born on January 6, 1980 in Massachusetts, thousands of miles away from the street where two years prior, Karl Wallenda dies on the pavement, in a city, on an island that he would know and he would leave. It’s not that this boy, now a man living far from that island, has a direct link to the event being related. At least not one that he can pinpoint before these reflections. An image, a recollection in a book by a German author sparked an interest in the high wire. The performer mentioned by this author was Blondel, the legendary Blondel. From there the link was established to Wallenda, a name the boy remembered from adult conversations on the island, a name mentioned in a conspiratorial whisper by those who remember the images on television and the corresponding narration provided by a local journalist—a news bit which led the evening news broadcast on March 22, 1978 the world over. After the memory is activated by this passage in a book, he digs up the footage on Youtube and watches the two minute clip for hours.

Wallenda comes across as a strong elder, walking the wire as on a pilgrimage, calm and determined but bearing the marks of a lifetime of near fatal close calls. The 30 year old footage is grainy and, as is to be expected in the new form of our Internet age, the fall, the money shot is the focus. Thus we see Wallenda teetering halfway across the stretch of wire tethered to the sea side hotels, the wind shakes the wire and he begins to crouch, his left foots slips, then he falls, then nothing, the clip is over. The voice over by the journalist, Guillermo José Torres, is cut short just as he’s about to collect his thoughts and improvise an explanation to the viewers watching at home. The context is missing; there seems to be no context. Clearly it was an accident, clearly the man was old, clearly he died. Yet what of the boy who years later unearths the memory of that man falling. The boy who grows into an educated man and has the words to explore this convergence and use it to speculate on the meaning it has for his life. Karl Wallenda died on my island, of all places, he tells himself. Here he finds a place to begin assimilating the event in the specious and often times contradictory trajectory of his own life.

My cousin Miguel "Micki" Delgado died this year. He was a Puerto Rican man in the fullest sense of the word. He loved a strong drink, he loved the natural beauty of our women, he loved the lush landscape of the island, he loved music, and, above all, he loved his family.

My girlfriend and I went to PR a few years ago, when we were living in DC, to take a quick vacation during a long weekend. When Micki found out she was from Hawaii he told her about his best friend from Hawaii who died in his arms during Vietnam. It was the first time I ever heard him speak of Vietnam. I knew he was a medic during the war, but beyond that I could only rely on the polaroid photos that I would see in his albums to give me a sense of what he went through. The photos that he would let me see with the brash young men posing with their guns and their cigarettes, clearly concealed a nastier reality.

At the funeral, Micki's casket was draped with the Puerto Rican flag, symbolizing not some political stance but who he felt he was to the very core, a Boricua. I left Puerto Rico when I was 12. I took with me many memories of Micki, his humor, his fluency with any instrument, his endless supply of herbal remedies. Through the years as I returned to the island to visit my father, we would always visit Micki or he would come see me. When I struggled with feelings of inadequacy when I ate a word or two in Spanish he would encourage me by telling me that I spoke with clarity and conviction.

I felt honored that a Puerto Rican man like him reaffirmed my own roots regardless of the circumstances of my life. I will miss him.

4.

My neighbors are cops and I suspect they’re also lesbians, but in the worst politically correct rejoinder characteristic of meek liberalism, I must add here that that’s ok with me. I wouldn’t call myself conservative either, because I can’t stand to be associated with all the rabid claptrap that spews from the mouths of the shock jocks and pundits from the right.

It’s an interesting time to be living in this country, the glorious U.S.A, of streets paved with gold fame, with the statue of liberty welcoming in her putrid, oxidized arms all the world’s famished.

I was there, just like all the rest, passing through Battery Island on a foggy day and there she was, beaming with all the promise of redemption for the world’s slime, just like in the movies. The statue of liberty, liberté, a tedious gift from the french.

Sometimes I want to be careless about my future, resigned like a head in the torturer’s vice. Matter of fact, I want to revise the rule book that reserves torture devices for sterilized chambers located in the no-mans-land territories where enemy combatants are strung together by their genitals.

I would break into my neighbor’s house (the cops, the lesbians) and put these contraptions in the middle of their living room, where else? All those machines, some big with levers, gears and pulleys, others as small as 2 inch by 2 inch metal cubes with red LEDs that blink sporadically. The cops, the lesbians are my neighbors. It’s an interesting time to be living in this country, the glorious U.S.A, of streets paved with gold fame.

3.

I knew it was ending, I just didn’t want it to stop. That morning I walked out of my therapy session with Dr. Olivia Samson with the feeling of futility that accompanies recognition of a problem and the lack of desire to make it stop, or do anything about it. I was feeling obsequious so I dropped the fifty cents I always carry in my back pockets into the tattered cup of the homeless guy on the corner of 9^th and Brentwood. A few more years and that will be me, I thought, as I always do when I come face to face with the subculture of the homeless. This is my second therapist. The first transferred me because for all of her avowed professional detachment, she could not conceal, or overcome, her disgust with me and the specifics of my case. Her demeanor always betrayed her sense of being a model citizen, a care taker of two kids, a respectable wife for a respectable husband, matriarch of a sturdy, colonial house just outside the city with a neighborhood watch placard stuck in the ground next to the bougainvillea bushes. I, for one, couldn’t stand the veneer of disdain that contorted her face when I talked about my supposed “aberrations from the standard moral code.” Dr. Samson, by contrast, has an interpretive bent and relishes (at least that’s how it seems to me) the opportunity to apply Jungian principles of the collective psyche, medieval myths and Freudian Oedipal melodramas. I am taken by her mode of explanation, laced with pop culture references and even some personal anecdotes, her attempts at making the standard divide between patient and therapist more porous. The police showed up at my door in late June on a rainy Thursday afternoon with a search warrant in hand. Apparently all of my efforts to hide the industrial sized equipment and other “sexual paraphernalia” were for naught, some neighbors claimed they heard screams from my basement and that sealed the deal. At the police station, at the courthouse, and during my first few therapy sessions, I thought often of the cliché that freedom of expression means nothing until you lose it. For my part, I always knew that freedom of expression meant that you are free to express yourself as long as the ever present we is able to watch you. The constant surveillance that I’m subject to now is only the logical conclusion of my actions, but in a deep sense I wished to be watched, the screams I manufactured where muffled but were there nonetheless. I’m like everyone else in “real” life, as they say, only I was forced into breaching that line that separated my hidden life from the miniscule figure that makes do on the day to day. “Perversions and pleasures are insidious,” says the Dr., “two sides of the same coin.” Another session ended, I leave to continue my dance with the other that is in me out of plain sight, in plain sight.

1.

A small mound of onyx pebbles, fifty to be exact, arranged in a pyramidal shape. Another mound of onyx pebbles on the left edge of a skinny, rectangular table. Two more pyramidal mounds of another fifty pebbles, one in a spot lit corner of the room, the other on the middle shelf of a bookcase adjacent to one of the walls. The door opens, fluorescent lights flicker on, and he stands half in the room, half out. He takes a quick look at the set up then turns the lights off. He guides her, thirty-five and buxom, onto the chair in front of the rectangular table with the onyx pebbles on the edge. She sits. He takes a chair and sits across from the table, across from her. They stare at each other for a while. She gets up, takes a pebble from the mound on the middle shelf of the bookcase. He opens his mouth with his tongue touching his upper palate. She puts the pebble beneath his tongue. He closes his mouth. He gets up, walks to the spot lit corner and picks up a pebble. She opens her mouth and takes the pebble which he places in the dip she makes with her tongue. Each pebble adds up and morphs their faces, they start to drool, and they repeat ad naseum.

2.

Hello?

Hello.

Hello, yes.

Yes, baby, this is Destiny. What’s your name?

Stuart.

Stuart, honey, how are you feeling today?

Kind of humdrum, pessimistic, shitty, lonely, crappy, miserable.

Damn, baby, is that all? What can Destiny do to change that tonight?

Well, I just wanted to talk.

That’s fine by me baby, anything in particular you’d like to share? I’m open.

I figured you could start.

Okay…It’s been a long day for me, but I’m looking forward to tonight, I may get a bottle of my favorite Shiraz, light some candles, play something smooth, and ease into a little silk number that I got yesterday…

Where’d you get the silk number?

I got it at Nordstroms, why?

Just curious.

You into silk? Well, I have this nasty little craving for strawberries today, maybe even chocolate dipped strawberries. I just absolutely love sliding that chocolate tip into my mouth and rolling my tongue all over that sweet goodness until it starts to melt…

I really like strawberries.

So do I, baby. What about you? Do you have any fantasies?

Umm…

It’s okay. What do you do for work?

I work at an IT firm. Customer Service. I’ve also been doing art at nights and I’m starting to get exhibited in some small local galleries.

So you’re an artist.

Sort of.

No, baby, you’re an artist. What kind of art?

It’s kind of complicated, but mostly conceptual and performance type stuff.

Anything I might’ve seen or heard?

I’m kind of embarrassed about this because of the huge turn out, the performance was to start at 10, but by that time there were so many people that the neighbors called the cops and it was shut down.

Wow, where you going to have naked girls standing around like mannequins or something?

Well, the idea was to get people to go to a particular show at this particular gallery on a particular day and read out loud several random thoughts that came into my head. It wasn’t philosophical or anything, it was just my feelings about art, superficiality, etc. I took out a classified listing on Craigslist explaining the idea and asking for participants.

What did you get out of the whole experience?

A newbie reporter for my local paper was there to cover the event, or the non-event to be exact, and he wrote a small piece about a fight that broke out in front of this gallery and at the end of the story he mentioned that I was supposed to have a show there that never happened. I got perverse satisfaction from being mentioned in the press for something I was supposed to do but never actually did.

That sounds kinky. Do you have any other art fetishes?

I’d like to fill the Guggenheim in New York City with the air powered plastic tubes banks use to send paperwork to and from the drive thru bank teller. I’d have people sending shit to each other all day and all night in those little futuristic capsules they have.

Damn, baby, you are conceptual, that sounds funky.

Thanks. Do you have any art fetishes, Destiny?

As a matter of fact I do. I’d like to write a whole book about the men who call 900 numbers just to “talk.” And then track down their wives, girlfriends, mothers, sisters and aunts and send it to them free of charge. What do you think?

Beautiful.