Bienvenida mi suerte . . .
The muse bit me last night. She left no teeth marks. I’m alright.
Manu Chao played Prospect Park, his first NYC appearance since 2001, pursuant (it is alleged) to a boycott of all stateside performances for the duration of the current administration. Perchance mere hint or allegation, but Perry Farell prevailed on him to do otherwise . . . we are as imperfect a nation as they come, after all . . . and to hit up a few other stops along the way. Berkeley, San Diego, Denver, Chicago. All but one solid, respectable blue states, not that it makes any difference these days.
I didn’t have tickets. I didn’t really need them. I’m tall. We (really I + they) occupied a knoll overlooking the stage where Manu, an already diminutive man compressed even further by the distance and then distinguishable only by a green jacket and a red basque beret played an hour and a half set on a refreshingly mosquito-free night in Park Slope.
Mano Negra flowed seemlessly into Clandestino and Proxima Estacion . . . Esperanza. That I can no longer distinguish which tracks belong on which album signifies . . . really nothing. We (again, they + I) sang along to "Welcome to Tijuano", plodded our way through a reconceived "Merry Blues", and stood in utter confusion any time our host addressed the crowd in his French-accented Galician Spanish. "Pinocchio" came with no syncopated horn section, neither did "El Dorado" come with its customary cry of "Chaccinha no Brooklyn!" or something album-worthy.
This performance will likely not be reduced to digital recording, at least not on the open market. No matter, I haven’t even bought a CD in three years. I seem to have had a few dozen made for me recently, but nothing to pop into the old mothballed discman, like I would back when I’d stroll (not bike) the Hudson listening to "Bixo de Coco" and "Mr. Bobby".
My first year in New York. I had just returned from Thailand. I had needed to get away after a year. As far as I could find a free bed. I swam in cave waters no doubt contaminated with guano. I lived in a house on stilts. I hitchiked on the back of a motorcycle in the middle of the night in Surat Thani province. I feasted on Dairy Queen at the Bangkok Airport because I hadn’t seen one in years. CNN Worldbeat was doing a profile on him. He looked like he was having fun. The "world" (code I discoverd for "brown people") beats, the fusion, the subversiveness, all a part of a universe permeated with poverty, hope, capoiera, futbol, rai, and negritude.
I came back. I was tired. I was alone. I visited Virgin Mega. I took a stroll. It was late Augsut, when the Twin Towers still stood gleaming in spite of themselves on the late summer sun. Two weeks later they’d be gone. This posits nothing in the collective heartache we’ve had to embrace out here, but it gives more import to the ordinary instance of simply walking down the street, unwares of the hot pursuit of history and its agonies.
I’d pick up Clandestino later that year. That trip to Egypt when I’d last see my grandmother. Countless question from my brother’s expat friends if I was okay. If I’d run into "any trouble". I would talk to them about missing posters of all ages and ethnicities. Likely gone forever. It seemed improbable that one in my living situation with my name and my origin could simply slip through the cracks; they’d need only follow me around with a camera on any given day to see how unremarkably my life usually pans out. If they wanted they could even join me in some particularly tortured reading of Welty. Might make things more interesting for me.
I don’t speak Spanish. I did not know what a Desaparicido was.
He’d release his concert album in the fall, I’d begun law school. I would break out furiously from Top Five, sometimes across the way to Washington Square, sometimes round the corner to Thompson Street, and listen feverishly to "Machine Gun", "King Kong Five", and "The Monkey" and dream about those places like Genova, and Mockba, and Barcelona that get to hear stuff like this first hand and really be a part of it, not a mere detached observer, up to his eyeballs in case law, out of his depth in law school, and wondering why they hell he keeps listening to music he could only 20% decipher.
Three or four years passed without an album, three or four years of law school and the bar, and now the post-bar, and the pre-whatever-the-hell-it-is-I’m-supposed-to-do-with-a-law-degree-and-three-bar-admissions. Three or four years hence, were now I bike to work down on Wall Street, only to be shuttled to a court appearance in Queens, then back across the bridge by bike to Prospect Park.
I attended my first Manu Chao concert dressed for court. I had fun. Perhaps we (I + they) had fun too. I really can’t speak for they.
I left during the second encore. Mala Vida. Notsomuch a second encore as a protracted coda to the evening’s performance. Machine Gun became Mala Vida became Bongo Bong which I can only guess would become Minha Galera. All throughout, he implored (in English) "the next station is hope". Indeed it is, although it bears mentioning that Esperanza is also a metro stop in Madrid, on which reality has also been visited in the form of shrapnel.
For me, el proxima esaction es 7th Avenue on the F Train to head back to the Island with my bike. It was late and I would not chance the potholes of Flatbush Avenue in the dark. As the F ascended near Smith Street, I caught a sweep of the Bay: the Verrazanno, Statue of Liberty, Lower Manhattan, a tiny sliver of Jersey, and what is improperly called "South Brooklyn". Over here is a bridge, where I ran my first marathon, over there a statue in whose shape a snowglobe my mother once bought for me, to my left a skyline where three thousand lives were ended in nearly an hour, beyond that a vast expanse of flatness where mine (for better or for worse) would begin, and down below the tremulous rumble of a city that need never pause to clear its throat.
I might’ve been exhausted. After all, I had biked twelve miles on a work day, after all after all. But I wasn’t tired. And I might’ve been by myself, but I wasn’t alone.
And it might’ve been made even more perfect if it had been the anniversary of the day I moved to New York.
Which it turned out it was.
