Personajes

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My house-mate Kazuo is awesome. He´s here with the japanese equivalent of the Peace Corps, as a fishing engineer working with artisan fishermen. He makes noodles for breakfast and dries fish out of his window and despite all that is really cool and smart.

One friday night he had his girlfriend Meigumi over and another friend, Miho, who lives on the beautiful but frigid island of Chiloe in the south. Miho has to live in a dirt-floor shack so she was living it up for her vacation to Valparaiso. So we had a sushi dinner for her, hwere I re-connected with my roots and rolled some flat sushi blunts while we chatted and drank beer and had wasabi-eating contests (I´m not sure who won. I had my face immersed in a bucket of cold water after the first round. Extreme Challenge Shame!)...

I was going to go cut rug with everybody, but I had promised some of the gringas I´d meet them in Valparaiso at La Tertulia, where a Buena Vista Social Club tribute band was playing.
On the micro ride to V, I ended up talking with Javier. Javier is 25 and works construction on the new apartment buildings going up on the swank beach towns north of Valparaiso. He just got married, he said, and they just had a kid. I realized it was 11 o´clock - Why was he coming back so late? Well, I get off work, then have to clean up and then walk to catch a micro, and then the micro takes another 2 hours down to Valparaiso, then I have to catch a colectivo (shared taxi) back up to my cerro (hill).

He gets home and spends some time with his wife and baby and goes to sleep at one. At five he gets up to leave the hosue by six to catch another micro to work to come home again at 11.
I told Javier I had worked construction but was now studying architecture. He gleamed - I´m working towards my degree, too... He´s saving up now because he wants to go bak to school to finish his degree in construction engineering. Here, no matter how much one knows or qualified one is, there is no good job available if you don´t have a degree, full stop. Colonial mind-sets and Pinochet´s free-marketeering have made Chile the 7th-worst country in terms of income distribution (gap between rich & poor) in the world - on a level with Guatemala and South Africa.
I told him I had worked construction but that´s not really true. I worked about a month and a half as an unskilled labourer (aka ´bitch´) for my neighbour´s construction company. I mean, it wasn´t easy, and thanks to my friend´s summer schedules, I got about the same amount of sleep as Javier. But it was nothing the same: I came home to home-cooked meals and would wash off the insulation and sawdust and be a normal 19-yr old in a middle-class home. It was a temporary job.

Javier got off and we clasped hands, Un gusto, mi amigo, and the micrero floored it without having come to a full stop.



The wasabi was still playing skittles with my nasal pain receptors, so I wasn´t paying as much attention as I should have been and the micro flew by where I wanted to get off. So I got off in a part of town that´s the kind you´re not sure if you should be getting off in at 11h30 at night.
I walked to a plaza, asked some people where La Tertulia was, and started walking.

A little ways down there was a homeless guy tottering back and forth on the sidewalk, with a few mattresses on his back and his arms full of plastic bags. He would go a few steps, a bag would drop, and so he´d reach down for it, and then the mattresses would slide round and he´d drop another bag. Then he´d pick them up. Rinse, repeat.
I was laughing too much not to feel bad, so I went over and asked if he wanted any help. He was picked up another bag and I surprised him so he turned quickly and the mattresses shifted back and he went sprawling.

Whoa. Definitely not a homeless man.
It turned out he was just a college student moving houses. Ha. Although he was doing his best to look as ´alternative´ as possible, so I can´t be blamed so much. Plus, after knowing him, he probably would have been thrilled to know that´s how he looked like. He had jet-black frizzy hair back in dreads, with an equal-sized beard poking down. But even through the fuzz his face was really striking - delicate, almost beautiful. He looked like a fox kit peeking through a heather bush.
A fox kit was lots and lots of piercings, rather.

So we walked up to his new house, a few staircases up a cerro. Every 20m he´d gasp and fall down and rest and we´d talk after he´d gotten his breath. He was 17 and studying art at Playa Ancha university (the same university that goes on strike for the whole week of sept 11th - when Salvador Allende was overthrown by the military. Incidentally, Allende´s was the only elected communist government in the history of the world). His name was Josef and he had been carting stuff on micros all day and this was the last load and Where exactly are you from again heuón?
- because he wasn´t sure whether or not to disdain me because I was semi-Yanqui. ¡Yanquis afuera! he said. I pointed out that the Yanquis here were making an effort to know other cultures - his- and you couldn´t fault them their quirks
Ok, ¡Yanquis afuera of everywhere else!
Fine, Josef ...

When we got to the house, he showed me his paintings and told me about an ex-boyfriend of his who studied architecture but Spent too much time doing architecture so I dumped him...
He wanted to go to the BVSC tribute as well so I waited for him to shower and parade round the house naked and carefully select his clothes (ratty shirt with ratty sweatpants and ratty converse shoes, which he has 8 pairs of, all carefully ripped and stained). He saw me eyeing all of his stuff and hastened to point out that he ¡wasn´t a Consumer!, he just, You know, had a lot of stuff, is all.

So we walked down to the club but first he wanted to go see La Mano. I was wondering what ¨La¨ mano could be since ´hand´ was ´el´ mano but we turned up a dark little staircase up to where a few old ladies were sitting in a portico. I was in my el/la quandary and before I knew it we were walking back down to the street and so it was too late for me to be angry at him for getting me involved in a drug deal. Although it wasn´t much of one; he just bought a foul-smelling pito of weed from an old lady. Plus, the fat old woman as cloak-and-dagger Mano cracked me up.

We found La Tertulia, after a while. By now it was 0h30 and there was only a little bit left of the band - which meant we didn´t have to pay cover!, so to celebrate getting in for free I bought a glass of red wine, and asked Josef what he wanted
Orange pie.
They didn´t have orange pie, so I got him an orange juice.

The band was fantastic, and there was a woman in at least mid- 50´s doing acrobatic salsa moves out of a Cristina Aguilera clip. It was mezmerizing .. then her - partner, maybe, at any rate a man in a leopard-print vest got up and they twirled round together in between the instruments and musicians with a pause and whirl centimetres from crashing into the drums, but never hitting and never missing a beat and the whole time locked into each other´s eyes.

There are infinite ways to make love, but that´s some of the best outright passion I´ve ever seen.

The vibe and the music were so IT in the Jack Kerouac sense that a few of us jumped up and started dancing. We didn´t care that we were in front or that we looked stupid, we knew it. The saying ´dance like no one is watching´ is wrong, I think. We danced like EVERYONE was watching (which they were...)
The woman grabbed me and tried to show me how to dance. I´m more of one of those ´move with the flow´ dancers (white for flailing around) and so when my natural expression is confined by silly ´dance´ steps, I fall apart. Which I did. Like EVERYONE was watching.

Josef, who had been sitting in the corner, nursing his orange juice and his high, finally jumped up to dance with me and show me how to do it and we danced around the stage together shaking our hips.

So the night ended with me getting shown up at dancing the macho, traditional dance of salsa by a raggedy gay communist. Great. I give up. Give me Boulder hippie parties where erratic is erotic...

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