At the parents’ house outside of San Jose, the wind blows furiously, sometimes for days on end; it’s a loud and constant whine, too irregular to tune out. We drove through the rain, past the mudslides and waterfalls and bloated brown rivers to the beach, where the rain continued to pound the corrugated metal roof of our cottage for another two days. Everything was wet, everything was green and glossy and grown over; even the plants here are covered in layers of green and growing things, bromeliads, orchids, and mosses. The towels stayed wet, the clothing inside our bags mildewed and the sheets were damp when we got into bed. The indoors and outdoors are not separate here. Even if the windows are screened, they aren’t glassed. It takes some getting used to each time, in the way the proximity of so many other human beings on the subway does. Nature is leaning up against me, breathing heavily down my neck, and reading over my shoulder, indifferent to sighs or dirty looks.
Another thing that takes getting used to is driving a Mercedes. We have been lent a fancy car while we’re here. It’s a dream to drive through the mountains and on wet roads, especially compared to the tinny rental cars we’re used to, but it’s a little like being in disguise. I’ve never really known anything about cars and after living in NYC for a decade I know even less, so I don’t know the model or anything, but I can tell you that this one looks like it should be driven by an elderly diplomat and his hairsprayed wife. It makes me think of pantsuits and designer sunglasses. I wear the Bottega Veneta sunglasses passed along to me as a freebie by a magazine editor friend years ago, the lenses now rubbed to a fine mist, and the arms held on by a naked twist tie and a mismatched screw, but I don’t think we’re fooling anyone.01 Or maybe we are. On the way into town, a cop stopped us and checked the trunk. What brand is this car, he asked. Mercedes, V told him. Exactly, he responded in mysterious satisfaction.
~
I am reading Fuschia Dunlop’s book, Shark Fin and Sichuan Pepper at the same time as I am reading Julia Child’s My Life in France. The latter is awkwardly written, but is exciting and gossipy enough that I can’t put it down. The former is as good as I expected it to be. The author is remarkably self aware, really thoughtful. I will undoubtedly reread. It is getting me all excited to continue to work on my interview project back home in the Bronx. When I have a reasonable bulk of information I will put that whole project online.
~
And a list:
Pan Toasted Watermelon Seeds (Just toast them in a pan.)
Taoist pills of immortality, among other things
We are in the land of happiness and spousal ancestors now, at the beach in the southern Caribbean coast. I have been looking forward to being here for months, but as usual I spent the first three or four days trying to stop feeling inexplicably late. I would sit on the beach for a while, remark on the waves, sunset, trees, you-name-it, and bound up to demand what’s next. Yesterday I finally unsnapped and took a two hour sprawling snoring sticky nap with the baby in the afternoon while V worked. (He’s staying on top of things, though I’m not getting much done. Next time we will arrange for a babysitter in advance.) Afterward we went to a little place near the beach to drink Campari and snack happily on french fries and a “carpaccio” of raw fish. On Saturday we went to the little farmer’s market where we bought, among other things, some of the most complex and delicious honey I have ever had. It tastes first of pure honeyness, then flowers, then like a fruit reduction of cas and lime and passionfruit and some other tropical fruit I can’t identify. (I have eaten up half the bottle already in an effort to understand the flavor.) The farmer and his wife from whom we bought it have a workshop up the hill north of town, which we visited two years ago. I will go back and buy banana vinegar, cacao butter, coconut oil, and lots of chocolate in a variety of forms before we leave. We tasted a snake fruit and spoke with Ancel Mitchell. I bought her booklet on local plants and food and lots of her dried fruit for Aure. The booklet describes local produce and edible wild plants. For someone from a temperate climate, the riotous fecundity is dizzying, the vivid colors and mad shapes all look suspiciously fleshy and potentially poisonous. (I’m pretty sure I wrote once about tasting some fruit at the beach that numbed my whole head, throat and hands. Tasty! Lethal! Yesterday a Canadian woman was telling me how to know when you’ve eaten a piece of fruit recently sat on by a poison dart frog. She claims it feels about like that.) It’s impossible to know where to start. (Ancel describes people who come to the farmer’s market, look around and end up sheepishly buying an apple from Washington state.) In fact, maybe it’s that way for the Costa Ricans too. I’ve always wondered at the simple and mostly quiet food here. The common dishes rely on a few consistent ingredients. Made indifferently, they taste, well—indifferent. Though there are exceptions: the grilled pork belly on a corn and flour tortilla with a heap of pickley vegetables and carroty hot pepper sauce on the street, spit roasted tepesquintle downstairs at Le Monastaire, a sticky-tender-crispy pork chop in chocolate sauce in an anonymous Caribbean soda, a simple fish tartar and a tropical fruit flambé at La Parcela, some astonishing fish tacos and cold avocado soup at a tiny hotel south of Dominical, brothy corn and pork tamales wrapped in banana leaves, cheeses and raw creams from Turrialba, a very spicy patty from a covered basket on the arm of a fat old lady who waddled out of the forest like an arthritic good fairy in the park at Manzanillo, Torta Chilena (not Chilena at all, but very Costa Rican and dreamy and easy to find), lots and lots of chicharron and gin with gingerale. Oops– now I am just listing good food I have eaten here and I will stop because it is easily findable in the same ways it is elsewhere.
Okay, so here’s the update on the corner. The crack ho who once looked like a middle class college kid backpacking across Europe, is now indistinguishable from the other women who sit twitchily on the stoop and stand at the corner. Her backpack and her caramel colored highlights are gone and her hair is brassy and lank. She’s gaunt and scabby and dresses in getto boy clothing, baggy pants, huge hoodies, baseball caps, and somebody else’s old timberlands. The criminal mastermind01 who took over after the murder of the last pathetic dealer is having some problems of his own. Or was. I’m not sure what the status is now. Things have yet to go back to the way they were. There is a vibrating base level of tension that did not exist here a year ago and then events spike up from there. A few months after the drug dealer was shot dead in front of our house, a women was caught in crossfire a few blocks north and shot through the back as she pushed her little boy to safety. She was leaving the laundromat and had no connection to the gunfight. She died. After that there was a lot of bustling back and forth during the day (past the playground across the street) and then things settled back down into an uncomfortable, but fairly consistent tension for a few weeks. That was disrupted when a strange bustle started at the building across the street. People who didn’t live there began sitting in front, day and night, along with a vicious pit bull who, though tethered, would spring and fall back gagging and barking when anyone walked by. It got loud at night and the corner dealer’s lookouts stalked back and forth, while the crack hos wandered a bit out of their normal itinerary. I called 311 and accidentally complained that there was a bad energy on my corner again. I may not have used those exact words, but I’m pretty sure it was something equally stupid. A malevolent force or maybe a prescient vibration? 311, as always, listened with deadly seriousness and demanded descriptions of everyone involved. (Medium height, medium build, medium complexion, with daily altering lined out facial hair. Oh yeah, black hoodies and Yankees caps. That should narrow things down for you, NYPD.) As always, I did not know the password to buy drugs, or the exact location of the stash house, but I do know what a tiny ziplock baggie and an antenna crack stem look like. (I no longer presume the existence of tiny sandwiches and tiny TVs.) I have the hard won streetwise sharpness of a suburban white lady who has watched The Wire and reads extensively in the noire genre. That is to say, I mostly don’t know what 311 is talking about when she asks me a lot of brisk questions about rocks and woolies and ploplocks. (I made that up, as far as I know.)
Once in the summer the baby and I were playing on the jungle gym in the park with my neighbor and her tiny daughter, when a dude came wheeling around the corner with three undercover cops, guns drawn, in pursuit. They tackled him and cuffed him directly below us as my neighbor and I pointed wildly in the opposite direction and asked in high cheerful voices if there are any doggies over by the fence, let’s go over there, okay, let’s go find the doggies, now dammit. The babies were not deceived and watched with timid interest as the police searched the guy on the ground and two more plain clothes cops brought another guy out and laid him at the foot of the slide alongside the first unfortunate fellow. The police stuck around for a ten minutes or so, poking in the bushes and scuffing at the mulch around the trees. As soon as they left, a flock of tweakers showed up to comb the playground and meticulously go through the garbage bins. We and they don’t mind each other though. They often sit on the benches in the park with the (other?) homeless people and in the morning at least, are happy to see the babies, though they don’t usually recognize us by afternoon or evening. They have to conduct all the business of their lives publicly. They argue and wash their faces and pluck their eyebrows and hook up and break up and have sex in the bathroom, where we don’t go both for fear of interrupting and also because of the evil stench.
A few weekends ago we were all awakened at 5am by a loud crack that sounded like someone had violently crunched a ping pong ball next to the bed. It didn’t really sound like a shot to me, but it’s always hard to tell about sounds that wake you from a deep sleep. V got up an hour later and saw a lot of cops and flashing lights. When we left the house at 9, there was blood on the sidewalk, trailing in a zigzag around the corner. The white painted brick and grating over the door of the building across the street were smeared with blood. I checked the police blotter again and again, but nothing appeared. I was very, very anxious for a few days. And then not so anxious any longer, because who can live like that? The people who were sitting in front of the building across the street aren’t there any more. I don’t see any signs of anyone other than the analphabetic chump who has been in charge of the corner since late June. The gossip on the block is that nothing actually happened– that is, some jackass got drunk and accidentally cut himself up, then wandered around for a while. Maybe. But the guys with the dog are gone now.
The neighbors who have been here a long time seem resigned. I don’t think they really ever stopped thinking of the neighborhood as the place it was in the early nineties. They shake their heads and say that things are bad now in the same detached voice they used to say that the Bronx “is coming up now” a few years ago. I suppose they’ve seen these cycles before. It all feels new to me. It’s as though there are simultaneous dimensions occupying the same space and until recently you could see into them but the seething tension in the space occupied by the drug dealers and crack heads read from here like a movie of a storm with the sound switched off. I watched it, and worried about the people inside, but never felt unsafe myself because I never felt compelled to go behind the school and buy crack in the nighttime (That spatial-temporal position is one of several The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe style portals between dimensions). Now the volume is suddenly blaring and the roar from the other dimension is making our dimension vibrate and compress a bit and just feel generally unsteady. I have been a bit discouraged. We get a lot out of living in this lovely landmarked building on this beautiful street, but I suddenly worry that it might actually be dangerous. A bit of inconvenience is fine, and absolutely worth it, but danger is something else. It’s a much finer bit of cost benefit mathematics and I am suddenly uncertain of my ability to properly assess the variables I’m working with. I am often glad that several of my neighbors with children also own their own places and won’t easily drop everything and go elsewhere. All this hand wringing is only one side of the story of course. If it were all bad, the decision would be easy. We’d just leave. But it’s not. It’s mostly good. I was reading Sweet Juniper the other day and feeling awful for minding all this when things could be much worse, and realized that Detroit and the Bronx are not comparable. The problems there arise because there is no one. The problems here, because there are a lot of us. The very structure that makes me feel a part of my neighborhood is vulnerable to the things that affect individuals apart from the built environment and infrastructure. Of course, it’s not all the same people, but it’s people and their people problems, not a lack of people. When I talk about that craziness on the corner, everyone responds the same way: it must be the economy. And at first that makes sense, and then it seems less obvious. What actually is the connection between the two economies? Is it quantifiable or is it really a matter of the quick, squishy answer everyone offers up about people feeling hopeless and turning to drugs. Does it really work like that, and if so, why? What’s the actual mechanism? And does that mean that conversely, when times are good people celebrate by eating leafy green vegetables? The next time I have a spare moment to chat with the internet, I will ask some difficult questions. (No. I will just look at some more photographs and drawings and fall asleep.)
