The Lexicographer's Rules

The bus ride from Mérida in the Andes mountains of Venezuela is simple. Mérida for a week. Small college town, poked on a plateau between a valley and higher mountains. Lethargy dominated, read in my room, scoped the delicious Danish girl (with boyfriend), ran around, when I ran at all, with two Brit chicks who when drunk were completely not understandable. Incomprehensible, unreadable, glowing happy drunks, bubbling away about this and that and everything else is naff, naff, naff. Walk around, take pictures of the cemetary. Body being exhumed, coffin rusted, bent, torn, sitting by wall, grinning girls shouting “Los dientes!”, the teeth, the skull, ribs, fibula, tibula, bones lying there. I check it out. Two burly, busty Latinas fingering the teeth, posing, taking pictures. One holds skull, supporting the mandible, and puts her head next to it, two matched grins. Leathered man in straw hat puts pieces in plastic bag, sweeps bones in, unconcerned, having just finished bringing bones to surface, to the world. Marker says 1974. Piece together the story: Kid dies, 24. Family is poor. Cheap grave, no concrete, cheap casket. Without concrete cheap casket rusts. So family saves, twenty plus years, saves, saves, saves, in the name of the dead. Up comes body for new concrete unleaking grave, new waterproof casket. But there will be no ceremony. Bones will be put in the new box, put back in the ground, family secure, having done duty and reassured themselves. Family not even present for the exhumation, the resurrection. Jesus Christ hovers nearby on every cross. Drafts and breezes and winds funneled through passes climb over the town, hawks and buzzards and big-winged creatures swirling, turning, twirling, winding down, down, around to catch another ride. Por puesto vans cart around anonymous passengers on unknown journeys, to the market, to school, to the bar. A few hostels in town filled with recharging visitors, from everywhere. German Martin decides to ride the bus with me to Bucamaranga in Colombia. Three in the morning, we’re waiting for the next bus of the day at the bus station. We chat. My Spanish isn’t what it will be, and the woman talking to me has difficulty making me understand that she wants me to take her child and hold him on my lap for the duration of the trip. Rules say, one child per adult can ride free. She is by herself, she has two children. I consent by silence. We board the bus and the little chap sits next to me, hands folded in his lap, stuck down between his knees, waiting. He doesn’t look at me. He’s done this before, and a man three times his height does not interest or intimidate him. Martin sits across the aisle. We talk. Martin has never been to Colombia. Martin has not read a newspaper in months. He has his trusty travel guide, though. Martin has been out for less than a month. He chose South America because of the favorable exchange rate, but didn’t realize that he would have to transfer all of his Deutsche marks to dollars before he could exchange them for the local currency. His pride and his favorable exchange rate disappear. Turns out Martin doesn’t know anything about Colombia. Doesn’t know about the rebels, the kidnappings, the shootings, buses being stopped so that passengers can be frisked for guns or dubious affiliations. Martin is surprised. I tell him that it’s a good thing. Crime devalues the currency. His Deutsche marks will go further. We take the bus ride. You’ve read about bus rides. They describe the sheer cliffs, right? The drop-offs? The dangerous speed? The twistiness, the turns, winding, binding, back and forth and weaving roads, those the stories maybe do not describe. I barfed, puked, gagged, vomited, made sick. Had to swallow it back down. The bus stops only for the driver. When he stops, you better run. Get your food, your bathroom, your cigarette, gringo on parade. You’ve got unknown quantities of moments in which to take entirely too long and miss your bus. Always order the plata del dia. Faster, plus high-energy starches. Beans, rice, yucca, potatoes. plus thin beef strip for color. We reach Bucamaranga. Early morning. Martin goes to the airport and takes the very next flight out of Colombia. Panicked, scared by the stories. Don’t know where he went. Me, to a hotel. Long nap, quiet room, a rare event. Downstairs, later, in a restaurant, meet Andre and Mark. Andre and Mark are British. We agree: one must set up tasks for oneself, events to be accomplished, in order to provide a point to each day, rather than wandering, wondering around. Many vow to see great churches. Others try every kind of beer. I am always on the look-out for a) an ATM machine compatible with my card, and b) key lime pie. I found no key lime pie anywhere in South America; that doesn’t mean it’s not there. Andre and Mark, however, have decided to a) take every opportunity to watch porn and strip shows and b) to take pictures of crippled beggars, maimed, marked, scarred, ideally freshly bleeding. Quite a picture collection. Stumps, nubs, ends, lumps, bulges, dark on white, white on dark, scabs, scales, peels, wounds, rips, bruises, tears, everything. They have an audience in me. There is, apparently, a scarcity of wounded in Manchester, in England. Once the steam-driven mills left, the gimps eventually died off. Thus, their invented package tour. We’re sitting in the café, a regular march of the poor wind through, their handlers, organ grinders, fathers, not hiding, standing there, directing the world’s greatest actors, children, to acquire idle cash and coins. One, I see later, is parked down the street, his brightly painted colorful van a household, children, too many to count, how many, coming back after each score, sent out again on a mission. But Andre and Mark enjoy their beer. New man, new mendicant, comes forward, unmarked, unscathed, except by street dirt. Mark and Andre ask in schoolboy Spanish, What’s wrong with you? Why do you need money? If you’re not hurt, why do you need money? You’re perfectly healthy. You can work. Our man gets it, understands, cross-cultural barriers broken. Knife out of his shirt, blade open, he pointedly slices his forearm from wrist to elbow. He bleeds. He bleeds everywhere, on the table. Mark and Andre take his picture and give that man a few coins. He walks off.

Told me his dream today. “It’s all in the dream, you know? You know how in dreams you just know things? Well, I was dreaming I had super powers. Lots of them. All kinds, like flying and stuff, and then I could hear somebody in trouble on the bridge. So I flew out there to rescue this person so fast that when I went to catch them as they fell from the bridge it was more like I clotheslined them. Head popped right off. I think it was the green tea I drank, but I don’t know. “But there was a second part. I still had super powers and I was somewhere else. I could see through everything but I couldn’t control it, like, focus it. So I’d look completely through everything, right through the planet. Couple of times I brought the focus in some but still all I could see was the center of the Earth, all red and glowing. “So then I jump up and start flying again (in my dream), and I can go into space as long as I want and not breathe. So I go out towards Jupiter and Saturn to check them out and I go way too fast. I get lost. I went way past the solar system and then I didn’t recognize anything. I got all these powers but I don’t know how to use them and I’m no smarter. How many people could recognize the solar system at a distance? So I panic, in the dream, and start hyperventilating, and then I couldn’t breathe. “When I woke up the cat was sleeping on my face.”

Even before teasing, flirting is purest communication. Beats talking. No doubt what’s being said: I dig you. Wanna see my apartment?

Got her all worked up today. Thinks I’m making fun of her, don’t want her around. Ummm, yeah. How do you say that? “Please, beat it. You’re driving me up the frigging wall with your shouting and your yelping laugh and your endless supply of crass breast-baring skin-tight clothing and the way you speak incessant Hebrew to your friends but then bitch when I read the newspaper at lunch.” You’d think we were married. God forbid. Wants to cast me in the role of abusive boyfriend she’s used to. Another think. Just teasing her like anybody. Otherwise, she’d be crying. Not treating her badly, just not like a girlfriend. Big difference. She’s possessive.

October 1994, Park Avenue, a block south of Grand Central. One of Manhattan’s mirrored glass buildings, looked great in the architectural sketches but completely bland, anonymous, vague in the cityscape. Lots of those. Sitting by the window on the twenty-first floor, 11 in the morning, thinking about lunch, a network problem, the tight necktie. A hand grips the window sill on the other side of the glass, outside, high up. Tight, bony, sinewy, thin, chalky hand. Fingerless gloves. A long-haired man in purplish shorts and a white tank top climbs up past the window to the next floor, hand and foot, looking skyward, not in. Who believed me? But there were chalky handprints on the outside sill for proof. Cops roped the street to protect passers-by from the possibility of a falling Frenchman. A caption from the New York Daily News: “A police officer (top) waits as French mountain climber Alain Robert scales the side of 101 Park Ave. in Manhattan yesterday. Robert, 42, was arrested on the roof of the 48-story building and held on a variety of charges.” He’s still active. Sears Tower in August, rescued on a building in Paris in September, heat exhaustion.