encounters in transit: three vignettes

1) I was sitting in a Burger King in Rio Abajo, a historically West Indian neighborhood in Panama City. I had been asked to wait there to meet some of the people from SAMAAP for the final activity of the "Conozca su canal" week, which was a visit to a sick elderly woman in a nursing home. I arrived late, but everyone else was later, so I wandered around a bit in the pouring rain, bought some vegetables and coconut from the fruit-market outside, and sat down in the joint to wait and outline an article that i was writing.

i ended up waiting for about three hours in the burger king, sitting at the sticky ketchup-covered table and scribbling notes on the only piece of paper i'd brought with me. throughout, i was observing the people at the "restaurant" - for example, spread out over two tables next to me were three middle-aged west indian panamanian men, clearly former or current employees of the Panama Canal. they were dressed nicely and had copious gold jewelry, and they spoke Bajan english. clearly identified. two were sitting together, and one of the two - this very attractive, slim man with longish hair - got in an argument with what seemed to be a complete stranger, the third west indian panamanian man, seated next to but not with him and his companion. the fight was about Iriving Saladino, the long-jump champion (and "Colon boy," as people liked to say, trumpeting his humble roots). one of the men swore that Saladino was afro-antillean, whereas the other insisted that he was afro-colonial, as he spoke no english and came from the Atlantic side. this argument grew larger and more elaborate, and the two men ended up at the same table, bickering for about as long as i sat in my chilly plastic booth, while the third man jumped ship, seemingly bored. the attractive man was all for the afro-antillean side, and he traced several polemics of differing persuasiveness - including some sort of culturally chauvinist argument about the afro-coloniales and their violent, crime-driven ways. the other man was quieter but intransigent, not giving way. anyhow, it was kind of fascinating to see that debate playing out before my eyes, and at burger king, no less.

i should mention that i hadn't been in a burger king in quite some time, if ever. i think that my paternal grandfather, who is now dead, used to take me there to eat this incredibly disgusting sandwich consisting of beef smeared with cheese, mayonnaise, grilled onions, and generally well-larded grease-fat substance. espantoso! it was so decadent that it wasn't even good - i remember wanting to throw up in the car on the way home. ick.

and i couldn't believe how packed the place was, considering that this westernized fast food is damn expensive. i don't understand how panamanians survive: food is extremely pricey, and salaries are miserably low. it may be the multigenerational living situation thing, but i simply don't understand how the middle-class of panama can afford to buy 6.00 burger-fries-drink combinations, which incorporate potatoes imported from idaho and beef from canada...so strange, globalization. and other clichés.

anyhow, while i was in the burger king, this old white man approached me. he looked like a wizened skull-face, kind of like larry david - his hair was shorn very short around his crown, and he was thin and wrinkly and pasty, with a hawkish nose and a sort of sickly stoop. he wore semi-sporty "leisure clothes," a sure sign of extranjero-idad. he had sort of come up to me before at the fruit market - as he recognized that i was a foreigner, his eyes flashed and he said something to the effect of, "do you know if this guy sells bebidas? mango? mango?" and i said, "no, it's only shredded coconut here, i think you're talking about the batidos, they're over there, i believe." his sports-clothes and sort of panicked inquiry annoyed me, but i tried not to get all liberal-fascist on him. but i knew that he wanted to linger and talk, and later he came into the burger king, walking in a meaningful way toward me. he sat down and said, "want some company for five minutes?" and before i could respond, we launched into a conversation that was weird and at the same time infinitely typical. he had moved to panama after being shown an ad for real estate, and he felt like it was fort lauderdale ("have you ever been to fort lauderdale?" i nodded yes, noticing his hairy chest and gold necklace. he had an old jewish man's raspy brooklynite-accented voice). he hated the architecture - "panama" he said, adopting a regal, halting tone, "is an ugly, ugly place" - but loved the people. it's amazing to me that foreigners with no understanding of spanish or anything else done or said in panama always "love the people." i guess they see that this is a very service-sector place, with no industry to speak of, but what i think is particularly interesting and even funny and cool is the gentle, almost viscous surliness and obstinacy - or just quiet peruke, rebellion through excessively slow movements - evinced by service-sector drones in this (or, i should say, that, since i'm back in chicago) place.

this reminds me, i want to talk about chicago at some point very very soon. i'm aching to write about chicago and the painfulness of being here, among spiking homelessness and poverty and despair and weary black and brown and smug white fat faces. not to generalize, but i've been taking the train and noticing these things. back to the land of the 'one-drop rule.' maybe it's the rain, but i'm filled with tristeza for this place, and i need to do something about it during my brief time here, before the research stint (where i also hope to act upon my sadness about the same issues - poverty, homelessness, despair - as they are magnified in the monumental white, bleached-bones ribcage and empty skull (death's head) of america).

but back to burger king. so i saw a bevy of young, healthy, greased-head panamanians eating expensive imported precooked beef patties, and then this old white man, and the west indians. the guy and i continued talking - he seemed like a thirsty person lapping up my english words, like someone who really needed to converse at that moment- and i felt a weird sort of pity-contempt mixture for him, though i try very hard not to feel contempt for others (because that is one emotion that is far too easy to throw around, like some sort of nuclear weapon. i try not to engage in arms races of contempt or arrogance. sometimes it's an uphill battle). but then he seemed to be satiated, having sucked my conversation dry with his invisible proboscis, and he scuttled off into his yellow all-terrain four-wheel drive, which he had parked, like a protuberant bumblebee, in the middle of the market.

so that's something of vignette 1.

2) the salsero and his pregnant wife. this happened to me one night down in the casco viejo, that beautiful crumbling place that gets transformed by steam and darkness into some sort of fantasy-scape, a james bond backdrop. there are two major hanging-out venues in the casco viejo - the aforementioned la casona, which is a hip-hipster-queer-rasta-etc gallery space in an old bank, and the 'baños públicos,' a rock joint that used to be the public baths for the nuns who lived in the monastery (or nunnery?) that was the old casona. this little club is free and basically outdoors, made up partly of tarps, partly of old stones (the baths), and partly with antiquated, mildewy velour couches and bookshelves for lounging. the sound equipment is minimal - an amp and a microphone stand - but there are always two musicians playing there: a skinny, ratlike guitarist who wears a beret, and a drunken old drummer with a dippy upturned montuno, the típico hat. anyhow, i was hanging out there with the lumpen-headed camel man (old chilean lecher), his 'spirit daughter,' otherwise known as my witchy roommate Salomé, and a weird Colombian friend who would later go apeshit and punch one of my other roommates in the face (long story). The crazy Colombian was recently getting over a breakup, and more recently reeling from a comment that her boyfriend made about her 'chortIZos' (see previous blogpost on jerga), and she wanted to sing melancholy eagles covers. she dragged me up to sing 'hotel california,' which i've heard maybe once in my life, and was very disappointed when i didn't know the words. when it looked like we were basically washed up, this couple appeared - a guy wearing a red t-shirt and pleated khakis hiked up to his waist, with a very angular panamanian haircut, and his wife, who had on her own latina uniform, with rhinestone sneakers and hair gelled to her forehead and a sort of placid half-smile on her somewhat indígena face. they were gorgeous, but in a slim and unassuming way. when they entered, the chilean lech got excited and motioned at the guy; apparently, he was one of the best amateur salseros (salsa singers) in these parts, and he'd often come here to croon to his wife. immediately, the guy runs up onto the stage and grabs the microphone, and he begins to sing - at first well-known standards, like "guantanamera" and "la bamba," but then increasingly esoteric songs, and finally just improvisational riffs. salsa sort of goes like this: there's a singer and a guitarist - perhaps the same person, not sure - and a drummer, at the very least. the singer does a lot of repeating, both of refrains and melodies, and sometimes keeps stringing along the same tune to different rhymed verses, until he decides to break into a refrain. i found the rhymed verses very suspenseful, because there was no telling how long this guy could continue to invent them, and he was extremely physically compelling: he had this huge grin with long white teeth, black eyes, something sharp and clear and hyper-animated about him. he looked almost like a cartoon, with large, bright swatches of color. the red background of the baños públicos, the red shirt of the man, and his clean khakis gave the whole place a surreal aura, such that i could not turn away from his jumpy, smiling figure, as he kept riffing verses until finally relaxing back into the refrain. the guitarist seemed to enjoy following along and taking his cues from this guy, and their faces got very close, but it was a lateral closeness, and neither seemed to notice it - a sort of clustering around the microphone. although the salsero's eyes looked off too the side, it was clear that he was singing only to his heavily pregnant wife, who sat there beaming and squatting a bit under the weight. the whole scene was riveting and intensely charming. i think i sat and watched the guy perform, rapt, for an hour. i just couldn't turn away. the music was measured but suffused with something of hope or optimism, some extremely evocative and full sound, and hearing it gave me this feeling of a sort of contentment without satisfaction. this is not, i should note, a scientific or technical description of what salsa is or does; this is like melville's writings on whales in moby-dick - somewhat pseudo-science-y, somewhat fantastic lore. i wish i had written about this when i saw the performance, when it was still fresh, but memory is seeming to serve. one song in particular was about this guy who couldn't stand his wife (all irony with this smiling salsero), and every verse ended on a somewhat minor key, and these continued for a long while before the upswell into the refrain. while we all clapped and jumped around like ebullient animals, the wife sat still and silent, staring forward and up at her husband. eventually the guitarist ran out of steam and the drummer started rolling around on the floor (it was our fault - we had given him some of our beers), but the man looked like he could've kept at it for a while. i was prompted to ask him if he was a professional musician, and he laughed and said that he worked construction.

3) this encounter is a bit silly, and it happened on a plane - specifically on the plane from panama to dallas/fort worth, where i had a layover and just enough time to bemoan the republican trickery while standing between texas-sized jellybeans and 'guns and ammo' magazines, not to mention obama-dissing tell-alls, at the airport newsstand. blah! anyhow, so in the morning i headed to the one restaurant in the airport, which was crammed with sunburnt dutch tourists and sweaty hairy businessmen. notably, these two cool-looking black guys were sitting in the corner, and i recall thinking, "they look cool, oh, they're probably too cool for me." i was still heavily into the whole talk-to-random-strangers thing, which happens a lot in latin america, and which i like to do in general. i think that this doesn't happen enough in the USA - here, we deny our genitality and other freudian detritus, cloaking ourselves with the aerospatial equivalent of styrofoam packaging. a buffer. this kind of thing definitely does not exist to the same extent in Panama, and i much preferred the proxemics there. anyhow, but so i was later sitting on the plane, and it turned out that i was sitting next to those guys. one of them was tall and skinny, with shoulder-length braids and baggy jeans, and the other was older, wearing a sort of trucker's cap. the tall, skinny one was reading from what looked to be a painstakingly handwritten list of spanish/english translations, all of which seemed to deal with sexual matters (the list read: YOU HAVE NICE HAIR/ I LIKE YOUR BODY/ LET'S GO TO THE BEACH/ HOW MUCH DOES IT COST/ DO YOU WANT TO GO TO A RESTAURANT WITH ME? and phrases of that sort). which wasn't strange, considering that prostitution is legal in panama. anyhow, before i could talk to them, i fell into this coma-like swoon, but after a while i woke up and we started chatting. at some point the younger man and i got into this very intense conversation; he told me that he was a nutritionist and only ate foods prepared on the george foreman grill, and he opened up his carry-on bag and showed me said grill, which he had apparently carried with him at all times during his one-week stay in panama. at one point, my glasses fell off my face, and when i went to put them on again, he said, "no - stop - when your glasses fell off, you looked like this famous, beautiful actress." unfortunately, he couldn't remember the actress's name, and so the pickup line flopped, and i felt suddenly plunged into this hilarity.

anyhow, he gave me his card, which reads:

End Result
Athletic Nutritionist Fitness Trainer
Ron James
ronromeoj@aol.com

The main reason which prevent people from getting fit is lack of being discipline. Are you happy looking in the mirror? Are You?

we began talking about obama, and he told me that he'd recently chewed out his african-american friend for having voted for bush in the past, saying, "what did the republicans ever do for us?" although he was sort of sleazy, he had something charismatic about him, and i told him all about my recent love issues, and he kept asking me seemingly unrelated questions. here's a reconstituted sample of what i remember our conversation being like:

RJ: Let me ask you a question.

Me: Yes?

RJ: What's your favorite movie.

Me: Uhh...don't have one. I uhhh don't really watch movies.

RJ: You don't????

Me: Um, no.

RJ: Okay. Let me ask you a question. What's your zodiac sign?

Me: Capricorn.

RJ: Well, that says it all! You're stubborn, girl! Stubborn! You have to compromise.

Me: Yes, I know that now. I made some mistakes...

RJ: No, no, no. Listen. What time is it.

Me: Um, about 5 after 3?

RJ: Listen: you'll never see 5 after 3 on September the 8th again. You have to enjoy life!

Me: Yeah, I am enjoying life...

RJ: Let me ask you a question. What is the first thing you do when you get out of bed in the morning.

Me: Um, make coffee?

RJ: See, that means you're responsible. You're a busy little lady, and you need someone who'll resPECT that.

Me: Uh-huh, I see.

So it continued on in this vein. We touched upon Bobby Brown's ill-fated marriage to Whitney Houston (RJ was displeased that she was "seduced by that bad-boy image"), the perils of drug-use among the celebrity caste, halle berry and her sex-addicted husband, the democratic primaries (RJ wanted Obama to name Hillary as VP), and a variety of other topics. and this brings me to the previous post, in which i stood inside the voyeuristic x-ray box, latest diagnostic sadism-masturbation tool of airport security, and RJ laughed at me, and i laughed too hard back, and they had to re-take the scan of my calzones. jajaja.