Homage to a Friend/Youth in Suburbia

Short and stocky, yet muscular.  His limbs stuck out, short and thick, like tree stumps.  His head was attached directly to his shoulders, and his clay-colored skin was peppered with freckles.

Jobs he’s had: event security, night watchman, valet at a hotel, lumberjack, storage, car detailer, Dairy Queen employee, landscaper, micro-chip producer, Safeway stocker, strip club cook…

He’s hated every boss he’s ever had.

There was a time when he would refuse to answer any call from an unknown number for fear it might be a collections agency.  At other times, when he would stop paying his phone bill, he would call me from different payphones.  He would spend his day skateboarding from one payphone to another, hanging out and smoking at shopping center parking lots.  He went from smoking Marlboros, to rolling tobacco, to dip.  When I used to visit him at his duplex, everywhere you looked you’d find beer or soda bottles filled to the brim with thick black spit.  It made drinking a bottle of Coca-Cola at his place a risky endeavor.

Economics in Ciudad Dario: The Life of a Liniero

Talking to linieros or former linieros, the stories they tend to tell fall into two categories: the tragic story; and the sleazy story.  The first is told with a heavy-heart, recounting the moral dilemma of taking money from people clearly suffering to make ends meet.  It is the story of the liniero who, after a few beers, looks down at his glass and remembers the families in houses made of sheets of zinc he visits.  The second category involves the sexual habits of linieros.  Linieros are considered by many to be seamy womanizers.  Stories of linieros with numerous different families in different parts of the country abound.  Other stories of indebt women offering themselves to the linieros as payment are also common.

Here I offer an example of each, as told to me by a friend who spent a few months working as a liniero:

Nicaragua: The Rainy Season

The morning is hot.  The sun rises and stares down at the women sweeping their part of the sidewalk in front of their houses.  It rises, and reaches its peak by lunch time, when its glare glazes over the hillside.  By lunch, the ominous clouds have begun to form in the horizon.  The pungent, yet fresh smell of wet pavement hits you like a premonition.  The wind dances through you with arrogance; the swinging trees, the ruffled hair.  Ocean blue clouds swallow up the sky like a wave.  You see a flash crack the sky or reach down and touch the mountain tops.  Or sometimes the lightning is hidden behind heaps of clouds, and the sparks make the sky look like a nineteenth century European battle painting.  The rain falls suddenly on the streets and zinc roofs; the noise of a large crowed giving a long round of applause in honor of the far off light show.  At night, the lighting makes the sky flicker like the walls of a darkened room with the television on.

Revolutionary Chile: Anatomy of a Strike

In 2008, the Chilean government, headed at the time by Michele Bachelet, attempted to raise the bus fare paid by university students.  The increase was not great, maybe ten or twenty cents, but the students saw it as an unacceptable infringement on their right to an economically accessible higher education.  The students immediately called a strike, refused to attend class, and classes were suspended.

What followed was an amazing show of both political and organizational strength on the part of the student body.  Students were organized by their majors or areas of study, and every other day they would meet to discuss the developments in the negotiations with the government and to vote on whether to continue the strike until the following meeting (which would be held two days later).  So, the strike went on, two days at a time.  It went on this way for almost two months.  For two months, students of each area diligently attended these meetings, like revolutionary councils, and voiced their opinions.

The process soon took on a life of its own.  The strike began peacefully, waiting patiently for the government to reverse its decision and return the bus fare to its original price.  Then, voices began to emerge demanding the government not only return the fare to its prior level, but freeze the price at that level for the foreseeable future.  The government agreed to cancel its planned price increase, but was vague as to whether it would be frozen at that level.  Students started storming university buildings.  They would break in and camp out inside, as conspirators on the outside would bring them food and drink during the day.

Economics in Ciudad Dario: Are Linieros Taking Advantage of the Poor?

This is the third installment in a series. Check out the first installment here, and the second installment here.


Linieros are traveling salesmen that sell common everyday household items on credit (the purchaser pays in regular installments, which the linieros goes back to pick up).

It is said that linieros charge up to three times the wholesale price on the items they sell.  So, who is buying irons for twice as much as they would pay in a store?  Well, it tends to be the poor. (Clarification: its twice as much as in a store, but three times as much as the wholesale price, because the retail price [the cost of the individual item at a store] is normally higher than the wholesale price [the cost of buying goods in bulk].)

Linieros go everywhere, from neighborhoods in Managua to tiny communities hidden away in far off hills.  They offer products that some people would only be able to acquire by traveling to the big city (which can sometimes be a long walk, and several multihour bus rides away).  Many people in the tiniest of communities have probably never visited a city, and to them the linieros and their array of goods must look a lot like the traveling gypsies and their ice in One Hundred Years of Solitude.

Nicaragua: Acción 10

The teaser for the news report was: “The Nicaraguan Mike Tyson?”

Was it a report on the rise of a promising but temperamental young Nicaraguan boxer?  No.  Was it a report on a meaningless drunken bar fight between two insignificant drunks, where one happened to bite off the nose of the other?  Yes, yes it was.  Numerous shots of the noseless individual followed, along with exquisite close-ups of the severed chunk of skin and cartilage that had been delicately preserved in a plastic bag.  The lighthearted report narrated the entire incident, with a few interruptions to listen to the victim’s drunkenly slurred account.  Synopsis: A fight had broken out, and the attacker had bitten off the victim’s nose.  Back to you, large breasted anchorwoman at the studio.

This is Accion 10 Noticias (Action 10 News).  Sensationalism to its goriest extreme.  The image that encapsulates this programming, the one that should be the background of every Accion 10 logo, the one that should appear on every commercial is the scene of a fatal car accident, the lifeless body of the victim strewn out in the middle of the street (no one having had the decency to place a sheet over it), the anchorwoman filing her report (standing to one side, so as to leave the cadaver in the shot), and young, screaming, laughing, joyous children running towards the camera, smiling and waving, jumping with their hands in the hair so as to get on television.  You see this image at least once in every evening newscast.

There are apparently no laws in Nicaragua prohibiting the broadcast of images of the dead.  There are also no moral qualms about doing so; nor do they seem to care whether the family has been notified.  (In every other country I have visited, it is rare [even unheard of] to see the dead bodies of people of the local nationality on television [the dead bodies of foreigners in foreign lands is another issue].) Channel 10 specializes in finding these dead bodies.  They aren’t ambulance chasers, because by the time the ambulance gets there, they have lost their shot.  No, ambulances chase them.

The Accion 10 Noticias broadcasts around dinner time, and it is not strange to see young children (ten year olds) sitting eating dinner as they watch close-ups of the vacant stare of the body of a driver whose head has been impaled against the steering wheel.  The child gets up from his seat and runs off, and I imagine him running to his mother and hiding his face in her dress.  As I am imagining this I realize he has already returned to his chair with a second helping of rice and beans.

Mexico City

They picked us up near the transparent square-foot glass tile that revealed the underground remains of Tenochtitlan.  The central cathedral stood a few steps in front, and I imagined some random door inside it with stone steps that would lead you down to the canals of the manmade Aztec island metropolitan.  Alas, instead of streaming down a canal in a canoe, my friend’s friends arrived in a four-door Ford sedan.

Inside the car we were greeted by Elena, and her tall forehead, long smile, and magnetic green eyes; reminiscent of an Aztec princess. (She wasn’t Mexican, but of mixed descent; part Philippine I believe.  Anyway, I promise not to overdo the Aztec references.) It didn’t take long for me to see that she was the kind of girl that broke hearts.  Her smile had a way of making your stomach sink.  Her effortless charm could be confused for affection, her affection for attraction, and her attraction for love; and one could see how a man could be lead down this self-destructive path, a path that would always lead back to that same stomach sinking smile; that smile that at times seemed flirtatious and at other times distant, when really all along it was just her way of smiling.  The innocent smile of a beautiful girl. (That’s one argument, at least.)

Her most recent victim was sitting in the driver’s seat.  I later learned that after the inevitable estrangement, she had called him up when she learned we would be in town, because he owned a car and could drive us around. (That kind of puts a dent in the innocent smile theory.)

Economics in Ciudad Dario: The Business of Running Lines

This is the second installment in a series.  Check out the first installment here.


Liniero: A traveling door-to-door salesman, who sells common household items on credit.

So how doe running a liniero business work?  What do the linieros sell?  How do the linieros get their merchandise?  How could they make so much money? (Especially taking into account that they have to make a trip to the person’s house every time a payment is due.)

The business works as follows: at the top, the head of the operation uses start-up capital to buy stock from El Salvador and stores it somewhere in his house.  He hires distributors, and the distributors contract the actual linieros.  Each distributor hires numerous linieros to cover different routes, and assigns some linieros to sell stock, other linieros to collect payments, and a third group to do a little bit of both.  The distributor is essentially a middle man, who makes sure the linieros are covering their routes, collecting payments from the debtors, and keeping their hands out of the money jar.

Marseille

Marseille tiene olor a puerto loco.

I walk past a woman in a head-to-toe veil: a strange purple blob, like a cartoon ameba.  Behind her, three gorgeous twenty-something-year-old women straight out of the pages of Vogue, their stiletto heels marking each step they take in unison.  Entering a small grocery store, I encounter the most beautiful check-out woman I have ever seen.  When it’s my turn to pay for my items, my heart starts to race and my palms sweat.  She is wearing a vintage Rolling Stones t-shirt, with a wide collar that reveals one of her shoulders.  I pay and run out as fast as I can without saying anything.  Across the street, I see the most beautiful street sweeper I have ever seen.  As I start walking back home I realize I forgot my change, I turn around, I got back into the store, and she’s waiting for me holding out the coins in her hands.  Reaching my house, I pass the prostitute who has been standing on the corner half-a-block from my apartment since nine o’clock in the morning.  I don’t look at her, and she doesn’t bother me.  The only unattractive women in Marseille seem to be the prostitutes.

Before going out, we stop by the a nearby fast-food kebab joint.  We head for his friend’s place.  The streets are narrow, the apartment buildings tower over us on both sides, the orange streetlights dimly flicker above; it feels like walking along the narrow hallways of a medieval castle.  His friend’s flat is bright and modern, with a bar, a spiraling staircase to his bedroom, and uncomfortable furniture.  His friends try excitedly to talk to me in their broken English.  One of them tells me (without hostility or resentment, seeking only to say something unique), “In Marseille they are building the largest mosque in Europe.”

Nicaragua: The Zombies

They reach out and grab you as you walk down the streets.  Their faces strained, their eyes squinting, their lips dry, their mouths stretched like a rubber band pulled horizontally to its limit.  Their clothes--stained, ripped, soiled--sag from their bodies; their skin--beaten, bruised, dirtied--sags from their bones.  You feel the force of their strength as they squeeze your forearm.  You taste the stench of urine.  They start making guttural sounds in strange intonations.  You shake them off, but they follow you; as they walk, each limb makes movements independent of the rest.  Their gait is like that of a person in Carnaval carrying a huge papier-mâché head on their shoulders.

We are walking to a friend’s house a couple of blocks away, and we cross through the central park.  We run into an old drunk there, and as we walk Peliguey starts toying with him.  Peliguey asks the drunk for some change and then for some cigarettes, turning the usual exchange with street drunks on its head.  The drunk recognizes Peliguey and starts rambling incoherently about sports.
“I taught this guy how to bat!  I even taught him how to play soccer, even though I have never played soccer!” He says, laughing loudly at his own cleverness.
Once we get to the corner of the park, the drunk starts getting clingy, as drunks will tend to do, desperate as they are for anything tangible, and Peliguey pushes him aside and we keep walking.
“Do you know that guy?”
“Yeah, he used to be my baseball couch.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, I used to be pretty good at baseball.”
And that was all that was said about the old drunk at the park.

Economics in Ciudad Dario: The Rise of the Liniero

Twenty-some years ago in Nicaragua, around the time when the Sandinistas lost power, there were businessmen who would travel from Managua to Ciudad Dario, to sell goods that could only be found in the capital.  These businessmen were known to make good money, and a few ambitious locals decided to copy the business.  They began to travel around the country, selling goods only found in bigger towns from the back of their pick-up trucks.  As time passed, they began to hire others to do the selling for them (these hires tended to travel by bus rather than by pick-up truck), and began to offer customers the option of paying in installments, thereby introducing the concept of credit.

These newly hired salesmen would be assigned a route (or line) to travel and be told to sell as much of their merchandise as possible.  They would also be instructed to return regularly to the houses where sales had been made, in order to collect payments.  Thus, the liniero, a traveling salesmen who sells everday products on credit, was born in Nicaragua.  Its birthplace: Ciudad Dario. (Liniero in Spansih literally means “liner,” in reference to the route the salesman must travel.)

The founding fathers of the linieros (those men driving around in pick-ups packed with random household products) made a fortune.  When they started hiring people to sell for them, those new hires began to make good money as well.  Suddenly, everyone in town wanted nothing else but to be a liniero.  And so began the great liniero craze in Ciudad Dario.  There was a time when almost everyone in town was a traveling salesmen.  When little children told their teachers they wanted to be linieros when they grew up.  When the unhappy few who were not linieros, would awake to a ghost town, everyone having packed up and left to work their route hours before the crack of down.  This was a time when Ciudad Dario became little more than a hotel town, somewhere people go simply to sleep.

The huge influx of linieros inevitably lowered the profit margins for the salesmen and the coordinators of the routes, to the point where people say being a liniero now-a-days is good enough to feed your family but not much more. Nevertheless,  twenty-years later it remains the dominant industry in town.  It is likely that around fifty percent of the workforce in Ciudad Dario earns their income by working as linieros.

Next installment in the series: How does the business work?

Nicaragua: 3:47a.m.

I wake up suddenly, for apparently no reason.  I toss and turn a little bit, finally ending up laying on my back.  I close my eyes, hoping to float away inside that helium balloon we call sleep.  That is when you hear it, like a weak signal on the radio--that hidden station you always turn past: the distant cries of hundreds of roosters like a brass band of condemned sinners marching their pathetic march to the gates of hell, accompanied by the endless wretched barks of dogs already burning.  Enough to raise the hair on the back of your neck, and leave you awake, praying, for the rest of the night.

Managua

Managua is a filthy avenue of tree stumps, dirt clouds, and plastic trash.  The streets are the color of dusty feet in bright green shower flip flops.  Managua is the mammoth Sandinista billboards that rise from the ash and trash of the ground, and feature the smiling president waving to (seemingly) another billboard of the president smiling and waving.  (Daniel waving to himself.)  Managua is the huge roundabouts with abandoned parks in the middle featuring the skeleton of a christmas tree whose christmas lights continue to blink on the hottest of days of July. ("Here in Managua, it's Christmas year around," goes the saying.)  A city of cars, where the only people walking are the menacing and miserable faces of poverty; shoeless and shirtless, their dark skin glistening like a lake, selling small bags of water and candy.  The men, in camo pants or cargo shorts, intimidating and unapproachable, moving their shoulders purposefully as they walk like a puma pacing in its cage.  Managua is the suffocating heat, and the nauseous humidity of a packed school bus with all the windows closed.

Managua is also the air-conditioned malls, fast food chains, and five-star hotels, that people get to in their air-conditioned cars, after leaving their air-conditioned gated community mansions.  The people who live in these air-conditioned bubbles, traveling from one air-conditioned oasis to the next, sit at the American-style food courts and eat nutella flavored gelato ice-cream, they go to European-style discotecs, and Japanese-style karaokes, they watch the newest 3-D films at the mall cinema, and reflect on their lives in coffee shops.  These reflections are made in phony valley-girl accents, (movies having mislead them into believing the California valley-girl culture is the ultimate representation of modern-day "high society") which include English words and sayings like: "Oh my God!," "nice," "fancy," "cute," and "cherry." ("Cherry" being synonymous with "fancy.")

And so, these two Managuas co-exist, and are only forced to clash when those street kids jump on your new Lexus and start rubbing window-cleaner on the windshield as you yell and sign, "No!" But they don't seem to listen or understand you.

my post-modern summer job

“Just drive around and look busy,” were the instructions our crew would receive most mornings.

We worked for the local school district’s facilities and maintenance department as temporary summer employees; assigned to assist in those extra projects that could only be completed in the months when the schools were empty.  Re-waxing floors, cleanings desks and furniture, painting or repainting buildings and classrooms, emptying out gutters…general up-keep.  That summer I was assigned to the moving crew: furnishing new schools, refurnishing old schools, delivering new materials and removing old ones, moving teachers around, ect.

It was a job with work that ebbed and flowed.  Some weeks work orders were bountiful, other weeks we were lucky to get a single one.  It was during those dry spells that one put into practice the art of “looking busy.”  We would get into our moving vans and drive around aimlessly, burning through the district supplied gas.  

The three golden rules of “looking busy” were: don’t let anyone know that you aren’t busy; don’t hang around one spot for too long; and never ever leave the school district zone.

The Tower of Babel

I worked on the 358th floor, for an internet company that worked on improving translation software.  A colleague had invited me to lunch at a new Japanese restaurant on another floor, and I accepted.  It had been a long morning of deciphering computer code and Azerbaijani dialects.  The elevator had recently incorporated some new mechanism that allowed it to rise and fall at great speed, without making the passenger feel nausea.  In fact, I could not tell if we went up or down, I just recall it taking longer than usual.

The only thing I remember about the restaurant is that the waiter wasn’t Japanese, and that somehow detracted from the quality of the food.  My colleague talked to me in his quirky accent from who-knows-where, about how he felt he understood his dog better than his wife. (I forget whether he meant this literally.) Halfway through I asked to be excused and went to the bathroom; inside I took an aspirin and leaned over the sink for a few seconds.  I suddenly heard a distant rumbling from somewhere above or below me.  The next thing I knew the bathroom was rocking back and forth, throwing me around like a rag doll.  I hit my head against the sink counter, and that was that.

The orchestra all around us

The following was inspired by a story I heard on the radio many years ago:

All vibrations create sound, and every sound can be categorized--depending on its frequency--into musical notes.  Therefore, the vibrations created by the motor in your refrigerator create a buzzing sound, and that buzzing sound if listened to carefully is a musical note that can be found on a piano.  So, there is constantly a multitude of notes being played simultaneously all around you, and your ear subconsciously picks up all those sounds.  A chord is a combination of three or more different notes.  If I play three or more keys on a piano at the same time I create a chord.  Three different sustained sounds in the environment also produce a chord sound.  If you are in the kitchen, the refrigerator is plugged in, a fan is turned on, the microwave is heating something up, and the water is running, you will create a four note chord in your kitchen.

Why does this matter?  Because music can influence your moods, and, in particular, certain chords can elicit certain emotional responses.  A major chord is constructed by combining the first, third, and fifth notes of a major scale.  Lets say we are in the key of C; by combining the notes C, E, and G we create a C major chord.  Major chords tend to be satisfying chords; there is a sense of everything coming together, of happiness.  Many chord progressions end with a major chord, because of the kick of joy and relief it produces.  Minor chords (which are constructed with the same notes as a major chord, with the only difference that the third note in the scale is made flat) are melancholy.  Diminished chords (where you combine the first, third, and fifth notes but this time you flat the fifth note in the scale) are sinister.  Seventh chords (first, third, and fifth notes, plus the seventh note in the scale is included and made flat) are suspenseful.  And so on and so forth.

So, if the notes produced by the buzzing of your refrigerator, the humming of your microwave, the singing of your running water, and the droning of your fan create a major chord, this might make you subconsciously happy.  If they create a minor chord the sounds might make you subconsciously sad.  Or so, they say.  Who knows?  The important part, I think, is that people talk about wishing they had a musical score to their daily life, the reality is they already do.

Mexico Today

The photograph was splashed on the front page of the country’s national newspaper, a classic image of modern kidnappings: a wealthy businessman or politician, with downcast eyes still seemingly in shock and the face of resigned defeat, holding up the front page of yesterday’s edition of the national newspaper.  If one looked closely at the newspaper in the victim’s hands, one saw that the picture on the front page of yesterday’s newspaper was also that of a wealthy businessman or politician holding up the front page of the day before yesterday’s edition of that same national newspaper.  They were essentially the same picture, but with a different resigned face on the victim.  The picture on the front page of the day before yesterday’s paper was of a third victim, holding up a newspaper from three days ago.  The newspaper from three days ago had a man holding up the paper from four days ago.  And so on and so forth, so that by looking at today’s front page one was also looking at all the front pages in the country’s history, the same way you see your own image multiplied to infinity when you stand between two mirrors.