Tuesday, August 4, 2020

Meditations in Transit

I started at some point meditating while on the subway. The subway, how many hours have I wasted staring away into the nothingness of an ad, or at a subway map, my head resting on the car's walls where a grease stain had developed from so many riders. Staring at other straphangers, guessing what they'd been through, were they coming from work, a night out or were they just floating around from bench to bench. All the different shoes, the latest basketball kicks or speckled Red Wings, does the devil wear Prada or Payless? 

When I was at Art & Design (HS), I had to take the E every day at rush hour to 53rd & Lexington. That wasn't fun, lemme tell ya. I'd get on Jamaica Van Wyck and pray there was an empty seat. I'd scan the adjacent train cars, ready to leap into action. I once jumped into a desolate train car during rush hour at 53rd & Lex, a half-second before I entered wondering why it was so empty, how could that be? That was a half-second before I was hit in the face with the wicked waft of fermented bum on a humid train in mid-June. You would think I'd follow the rest of the folks that made a bee line for the doors at the end of the cars. Nope. I stayed on a full 45 minutes until Jamaica Van Wyck, happy to have a seat. 

Nowadays, I sometimes ride the tram here in Strasbourg. There are characters; the drunkard winding in with a beer can of 8,5% alcohol, the geriatric Alsatian couple shuffling onto seats, the young Arab kid with his fake Gucci murse and skinny Bayern Munich track pants. Le Ried the train stop, I think I'm in the hood (if I'm not mistaken, this hood is next to le Marais), this is supposed to the equivalent of East New York, where money and herb exchange hands like the Rastas used to do it by the McDonald's on Queens Bully and Jamaica Ave. And yet here I am, wearing my rojiblanco jersey, still rocking some Lululemon shorts from my stint there and blue flip-flops and I'm chillin', not a care in the world. Life here is easier, simpler, you can still get stuck up at knifepoint or assaulted but it doesn't happen with the same frequency. I also hardly take the tram, I have a bike and to get from one end of the city to the other can take 20 minutes, 30 if you're really on the outskirts. And so it's hard to meditate while riding my bike, my commute was a mere 10 min. So now those moments come when I travel, when I'm on a train heading to Paris or a bus on the way to Frankfurt. I have my writing book, a liner (because I hate ballpoint pens), a book to read and headphones. I think I'm ready for my journey.

Saturday, August 1, 2020

Chip off the old blockhead

My dad, Filiberto Ramirez, was born August 22, 1930. He was born in a poor village outside the capital of San Salvador called Huizucar, he'd jokingly say, "Soy de la República Libre de Huizucar!"

He grew up poor, he'd tell me, he'd run around barefoot. Even though my grandfather Papa Marcos was a cop (supposedly a metermaid), they still struggled with the number of kids and expenses. My dad was the second-oldest of six, they were: Miguel (deceased, he died before I was born), my pops, tía Lola, tía Mila, tía Esperanza and tío Marcos. He said that he grew up in a house with many animals, lots of dogs and with an orchard with many different types of trees (mango, avocado, plantain, etc.) He was always talking about this orchard, he loved them! My dad had a green hand; our small, one-bedroom apartment on 144th resembled the Amazon. (Mom would complain about him ruining her bowls and plates with his damn plants.)

When he was young, he'd run around barefoot and bathe in the river. He used to walk 15 km (10 m) to get to the capital on foot . I know lots of people have heard these kinds of stories from their grandparents and felt like they were exaggerating, I know for a fact my dad wasn't. 

First of all, there's my dad's green toe. No, that's not a bad pun. No, it's not a typo. My dad's big toe, the right one, I think, had a nail split in two that grew from the corners and formed an X, not to mention it was this gnarly khaki color. The story goes that he was playing football (soccer) with the boys of his village in a local lot and he was barefoot. He went to kick the ball and there was something sharp and metallic jutting out from the ground that hooked his toenail, ripping it off in the motion. It got infected and didn't heal properly hence the X-Men toe, he didn't seem to care about it though.

Secondly, my dad, when he still had the will to shower, would do it with a bucket and bowl (in Salvi Spanish that's: bañarse con un guacal) and the water would be cold, even during the winter. I thought he was insane: why on Earth would you bathe with cold water when you can shower with hot water?! However, I noticed something when I visited El Salvador for the first time last summer, it's a luxury to shower with warm water. Maybe this is obvious to you, maybe not, it wasn't to me before visiting El Salvador. The first hotel we stayed at only had one temperature setting for the water and that was cold, in fact, many places we stayed at only had cold water (I was under the impression that tropical climate equals hot water, man, was I wrong!). Suffice it to say, I took some of the fastest showers of my life!

My dad used to tell me how he'd walk all those kilometers on the way to the capital in the wee hours of the morning, barefoot, accompanying the ladies of the village who were on their way to sell their wares at markets in Sivar (San Salvador). He said that each time they set off from the village a black dog would appear and keep them company until they got to the outskirts of the metropolis. This wasn't a known dog, just a random stray like the many you'll see any day of the week in El Salvador. Turns out there's an urban legend called "el cadejo", there's a black dog and a white dog and both are good in their own ways: the black one scares straight those that are going down the wrong path and the white one protects those in need. I've seen these street dogs accompany us, wild dogs that let me pet them and were super sweet, sweeter and nicer than some dogs owned by upstanding citizens with a leash. My dad was kinda like those strays, mi viejo era un chucho de la calle.

In his adolescence, he befriended a boy named Lorenzo, Lorenzo De Sola. (The De Sola were supposedly one of the 14 families that ruled El Salvador as an oligarchy.) He said that one day he was walking on his way to school when Lorenzo, driving his own car, recognized him from school and offered to give him a lift. He said that along with taking him to school from time to time he also invited him over to his mansion. He developed a crush on Lorenzo's sister (but nothing ever came of it). He also developed a love and admiration for Lorenzo for being so kind and generous despite the obvious difference between them. He made such an impression on him that he decided to name his fifth child after him, thing is, my mom wanted me to have an English name. So she asked one of the staff at the hospital where I was born, "How do you say 'Lorenzo' in English?" and they replied, "Lawrence". That's how I wound up being one of the first of my family to have an English-sounding name, my mom's thinking was that I'd have it easier this way (until they read my last name). Larry, being the shortened version of Lawrence (and probably easier for my folks to pronounce with their rolling R's), is what everyone calls me now but, every now and then, my dad would call me "Lorenzo!" in his gruff, joking tone. My siblings and I had our doubts because my dad had a penchant for telling anecdotes with improbable elements like they were the most natural thing in the world (see: cadejo story). He was like a walking, breathing Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel. So we decided to look it up and he does exist, the De Sola family were a rich family that made their fortune in Curacao and later emigrated to El Salvador. A kid from an obscenely wealthy family and another from the sticks, the two friends, it sounds like The Prince and the Pauper.

My dad loved architecture. He was always talking about how he studied it in school, in uni, and how he was never able to fulfill his dream of being an architect. He graduated from college with his architecture degree and even completed some small projects but he fell into what would become his career, working as a foreman and later accountant at the International Railways of Central America (IRCA). He worked there for many years, rising through the ranks through hard work and charisma. It was during this time that he met my mom, Gloria Sanchez Chavez, who was working there as a secretary. My dad, smitten by her, decided to ask her out and so began their romance. (This story was much more romantic when I was younger and hearing it retold as an adult was bookended by insults like "ese imbécil" and "ese inútil" as well as introducing the notion that their marriage wasn't so Shakespearean.) They would go on dates chaperoned by my grandma and aunt Adela and if they were lucky they might hold hands (No touching!). 

Before getting married and all that, there were other stories. My dad had a child out of wedlock (my half-brother Pablo, he's the oldest) and the details surrounding his birth and sudden disappearance of his mom a few years later (she up and left, according to my parents, one day) are still murky to this day. It's a touchy subject for many involved, dad would never really talk about who she was, how they met, and I never thought to ask (or maybe I just wasn't brave enough).

My dad was the biggest pinkie liberal you could meet. He became politicized in college, railing against the right-wing, military government. El Salvador was prosperous for those in power yet increasingly unjust to the lower echelons: landless farm labor and tenant farmers. To give you an idea, read up on the 1932 Peasant Massacre. Peasants, aiming to pass through reforms which would give them a semblance of justice in dealing with the wealthy land barons, were massacred by government forces. They didn't stop at killing the leaders of the revolt, they indiscriminately killed anyone carrying a machete (a machete is a farm tool used to cut down crops, most peasant farmers could be seen carrying one not as a weapon but as a simple tool of the trade). The same reforms that the insurgents tried to push through in 1932 were the same that were being proposed as late as the late 70's when El Salvador entered another stage in its history. This was a time when there was a lot of political activity in Latin America and the US had a tentative grip on the situation. My dad became active by protesting, organizing and collaborating with leftist groups. This was a time marked by disappearances of dissidents by the infamous "death squads" (escuadrones de la muerte) who silently dispatched their victims. He was lucky enough to avoid detection during these years when a college education could equal a death sentence. It was this civic fervor that he brought to the US with him when he immigrated. Remember IRCA? IRCA is a North American company and my dad petitioned to get a work visa so he could work in the US, he wanted to follow in my aunt Esperanza's footsteps. Once in the US, he'd become an active and prominent member of the Centro Salvadoreño (which is now the Centro Cuzcatlán). 

There was a lot at stake. El Salvador, a banana republic, was an industrial hub in the heart of Central America. Here's Salvadoran history (and some geography) in a nutshell: El Salvador was a vassal state or fringe Maya region in the pre-columbian era (before the 1500's). It's on a tiny, dense land filled with volcanoes, 23 to be exact, and tropical jungles. Civilizations would spring up, flourish and fall with the pulverizing force of an eruption. Wash, rinse, repeat. Cue the Spaniards, they thought that after defeating the Aztecs in Mexico that Central America would be a breeze but they were wrong, the first expedition into what is now El Salvador by Alvarado would end in failure (though the second, with a sizable force, were victorious in subjugating the local tribes. Under the Spanish, El Salvador's main crop initially was indigo but that later changed to coffee. To this day, El Salvador's main export is still coffee (due to the volcanoes; volcanic soil is extremely fertile and the high altitudes make for the best Arabica). When Central America gained its independence from the Spanish (it would later split into the countries we now know: Belize, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua and Costa Rica), it traded one imperial power for another; the US. The US exercised dominion over this region, and the rest of Latin America, through its economic interests by way of the United Fruit Company (the original UFC, which is now Chiquita Brands International). The United Fruit Company would buy huge swaths of land at bargain prices from the local governments and its these multinationals that helped install repressive regimes who helped the machine run smoothly. When a government decided to rein in these injustices with pesky reforms, CIA operatives and paramilitary forces were sent to protect American interests (check the 1954 coup of the democratically-elected president Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala which radicalized a young doctor named Che Guevara). In fact, IRCA was a US company started with the express purpose of transporting those United Fruit Company crops to shipping ports. It was during the sixties and seventies that more and more movements started empowering peasants and the poor into claiming their basic human rights. A powerful figure in this movement was Monseñor Romero. He was a catholic priest who spoke out against the inhuman conditions that Salvadorans were living in and for them to reclaim those rights. He was dubbed "the Voice of the Voiceless" by his followers and became a thorn in the side of the totalitarian government. So much so that, on March 24, 1980, armed gunmen entered the church where he was officiating and assassinated him on the altar while he was giving mass. His murder caused an uproar and his funeral drew thousands to the Cathedral in San Salvador. The government forces, it's unclear under what auspices, fired into the crowds, slaughtering hundreds of innocent people (my aunt Miriam recalled that day, she said she climbed over a construction site fence to save herself from the shower of bullets and huddled along with others in the sanctuary of the cathedral). This event, like the many cataclysmic eruptions in El Salvador's history, would lead to the Civil War, one of the bloodiest in human history and a reason why I and many of my brethren find themselves outside El Salvador, there are more Salvadorans abroad than there. It's this history that marked my dad in his political ideals and that marks us all as Salvadorans, whether or not you share with same idealogies you're affected nonetheless. 

I heard a lot about this history, my history, our history, at the protests, meetings and parties. And he would drag me to most of them, I was his sidekick by default. I remember when we went to DC to a national protest (and saw the White House and Lincoln Memorial for the first time). The parties, going to Hempstead for meetings, going to rallies. I remember walking around Far Rockaway in a parade to celebrate Central America's independence (Sept 15th). In my household, Castro was the Virgen de Guadalupe. Hugo Chavez was another member of the pantheon. I remember when I was 7 or 8 and I came home talking how I learned about this dude named Columbus who was a great man. My dad muttered under his breath, "ese criminal". I'll never forget it, it was the first time anything I learned was challenged. This had a profound impact on me, it taught me critical thinking at an early age.

I mostly saw my dad at night or on the weekends. He worked a lotta shit jobs; as a cook, a furniture mover, a messenger and as a factory worker among other things. He worked long hours for little pay and drank too much when he wasn't working. I resented him as a child, he used to be trigger happy with the belt after a couple "escrudraibers" in his belly. I didn't and couldn't understand the kind of work he was doing or the obstacles he was facing on a daily basis. As an immigrant myself now (I detest the term "expat"), I'm beginning to see to a small extent what he might've gone through. He lived in Hell's Kitchen when it deserved its moniker, fresh off the boat. 

For a time, I was a Spoken Word poet. I performed at various universities (including NYU, Yale, Amherst and CUNY) as well as poetry cafes around the city. I performed once at Queens College and mentioned it to my dad as I hustled out to catch the Q44. When I stepped up to the mic I could see my dad in the back of the room and we came back home in his car (I think it was the 1978 Ford Thunderbird, a beaut in her day and a relic by this point). There was the time my parents, along with my sis Evelyn, Ruddy and Eddie (Ruddy's boy), came to see me compete at the Friday night slam at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe (a friend of mine was one of the MCs and would regularly offer me a spot). It was one of my fondest moments being able to perform in front of them, they were really supportive (even if half the shit I said probably went over their heads) and they both expressed how they were proud of me. Years went by, I used to religiously go to our writing workshop (Mindf*ck), facilitate my own and hit up as many open mics and slams as possible. One day my dad called me over to his room (as was his habit) and pulled a yellowed cutout from a newspaper. He unfolded it and began to explain how when he was a young man in his twenties he'd write poetry and a local newspaper would publish it. There it was on the cutout, "Celos por Filiberto Ramírez", a short poem about his envy of his partner's previous lovers. He never mentioned writing or poetry, this was news to me, and not only was he a writer but he was published. Despite trying to find my own path, to be my own person, our paths kept paralleling each others.

You could say I'm a chip off the old blockhead. 


Wednesday, June 3, 2020

Haiku: Outside

Outside is freedom
Outside was freedom
Outside will be freedom 

- Olga Garzón

Recently, we did a workshop on haikus and I told my students that the theme is "outside". Given the current situation, it really resonated with me.

Thursday, April 9, 2020

Lost in translation

For one of my birthdays when I was teen, I asked my dad to tell me 'I love you'. 

I wrote it in a note in my simple Spanish (at the time, I was nowhere near the level of fluent I am now), I wrote: "Papá, para este cumpleaños yo no quiero nada, ningún regalo ni ropa ni nada, sólo quiero que me diga 'Te amo'" (Dad, for my birthday I don't want anything else, no gifts or clothing, nothing, I just want you to tell me you love me). 

You might wonder, why would I ask him that? Growing up, my dad wasn't an affectionate man. Not really, at least. He used to hit me, just like he hit all my other siblings, and so there was a degree of fear involved. There were his constant admonitions to 'be a man' and 'los machos no lloran' (men don't cry), which in hindsight is a pretty ludicrous thing to say to someone when you're hitting them for the slightest offense. I also got the sense growing up that I wasn't enough, enough of a boy, not manly enough, I wasn't a jock constantly playing sports, I liked them but not to the same extent as my dad. I got the feeling that he thought I was gay because I spent so much time with my best friend Jason. How did I know? At around the age of 15, I renounced my Catholicism in front of my assembled family on the grounds that I felt it couldn't be the only correct religion thus not being right for me, so how could I devote myself to it? My dad's first question was, "Are you gay?!". I was furious at him in that moment, I couldn't understand his logic, I couldn't understand how he couldn't listen to what I was truly saying. I went back to school the next day and told Jason all about it, Jason was mortified and exclaimed, "oh man, you're dad thinks I'm gay", to which I soothingly replied, "don't worry, he thinks I'm gay too". 

There was the drinking, the frustration, my dad was a walking powder keg, one second he could be smiling and laughing and the next he could fly into a rage, yelling at the top of his lungs. It was this mixture of love and rage that I think confused me, how can you love a person that you strike? Now, I've come to terms with that in the sense that it's something from the past and I won't hold it against my parents, especially my dad (since he was the enforcer and I can count on my hand the number of times my mom hit me). I can reconcile that as an adult but how do you make sense of it as a child? You can't, I couldn't, I had all these question marks and no straight answers and so I decided to ask something small of my dad, a gesture. 

When my birthday rolled around, he said that he'd read my note, looked in my eyes and said, "te quiero". I knew this meant something affectionate but it doesn't literally mean 'I love you' in Spanish, it literally means 'I want you' but to a teen who learned Spanish speaking with his family and not having had a formal education in the language it sounded like a cop out. It sounded like another disappointment. It sounded like, "I'm not capable of saying 'I love you', here, take this instead". 

It wasn't until years later that I learned that 'te quiero' is just as good as saying 'te amo', it's more common in fact. And it wasn't until then that I realized that my dad loved me all along, it was just lost in translation. 

Monday, April 6, 2020

The Yankees and my pops

As long as I can remember, I've been a Yankee fan. My dad's pinstripe passion infected me from a young age. He would take me (sometimes drag me) to Yankee Stadium to watch games, riding shotgun to the Bronx, the cool nights up in the nosebleed section.

My dad was a diehard fan back in El Salvador. He would tell me how he used to listen to the games on the radio, imagining the great feats of Mickey Mantle and Joe DiMaggio. My dad LOVED the Yankees and it was fitting, even though I grew up in Queens, that I'd one day love the Bronx Bombers too. 

My early childhood memories revolved around baseball. I didn't play, apart from playing catch with my dad outside my mom's job, but we watched countless games. There are more than a hundred games in one season of baseball, multiply that by years and you can get a sense of how much baseball we watched. And every game was important, every game was life or death, every game had my dad yelling at the screen, "¡Estupido! Baboso!". My hero growing up was Don Mattingly and he was the embodiment of masculinity of that era; he had dark brown hair and eyes and a moustache, he had a stoic look to him, rarely smiling, like a somber general. He was our captain and my favorite player but there were others: Paul O'Neill, Danny Tartabull, the list goes on. I also knew all the statistics, how many pennants the Yanks had won (a pennant is when you win one division, Major League Baseball is divided into two divisions: the American League and National League, the Yanks are in the former). It was the 80's and the Yankees, despite their pedigree, were a mid-level club, almost always in the playoffs but never champions. My dad and I suffered through this era, each time they reached the playoffs only to lose a series. My dad and I suffered a lot with our teams, it wasn't only in baseball, we're Knicks fans ('94 and '99 were particularly disappointing), the Giants and Jets (the Giants wouldn't be champions until Eli Manning came into the picture in the 2000's) and in soccer, El Salvador is the perennial punching bag for the rest of CONCACAF. My dad never wavered in his loyalty, though, he never doubted, each new match was an opportunity to silence the doubters in his eyes. I'm like that, the teams I've chosen to support will remain my teams, through thick and thin, because that's what he taught me it means to be a fan. 

My dad wasn't just a baseball fan, he was a sports fan. I remember a few years back I scolded him for watching golf even though I was pretty sure he didn't have a clue what was going on (and the broadcast was in English, so he def didn't understand the commentary). That's all he ever wanted to watch, sports, I couldn't understand why. My dad played sports growing up, he loved playing soccer and even coached a team consisting primarily of my cousins and family at one point. Maybe it was because it's a distraction, something (arguably) clean and pure in a world rife with corruption and violence. Maybe it was because he loved the narrative, David versus Goliath, pulling for the underdog to pull off the improbable victory. Whatever the reason, the man loved sports!

I, in true Larry fashion, rejected this at some point. In my teen years I started to hate sports, in part because I was physically smaller and weaker than my counterparts and so it was frustrating to keep playing, and in part (subconsciously) because he loved them so much. If you learn one thing about me it's this, I'm a contrarian by nature. It's the reason why I never played soccer growing up even though the majority of my cousins played at some point. It's the reason why I gravitated towards martial arts and shunned team sports. My dad was still there though, he used to take me to my martial arts classes, my Wushu class, he'd drive me to and from Ditmars Boulevard to the Tiger Kim studio that you could see from the subway platform. I remember the first class, my dad had to help carry me down the stairs because I was barely able to walk down them by myself. That was every Saturday and Sunday, I never thought about it until now... but he took me to all those classes before I was able to go on my own. 

And so I continued on this trajectory, studying martial arts, ignoring sports, loathing them, until one day it all came full circle. I love them now, I watch football as often as possible. I support FC Barcelona, Atleti, all my NY teams. I go to watch games live if I can, I've been to the new Yankee Stadium a few times. I play catch, kick the ball around at picnics, yell and shout when my team scores and really feel the game. I got that from my dad.

Tuesday, January 7, 2020

random 120

Canary yellow, cell fallen 
It's FA cup, no one cares; there, no one cares; here