Smokljana (It's a Serbo-Croatian thing)

8/2-8/11

The Washington fun continued on Wednesday, though no salted pork or fruitcakes were involved. Instead, I met Steve, a friend of my sister’s, and a gaggle of female friends for a nighttime voyage on the Chesapeake in his 39-foot sailboat. Once we’d purchased the beer and snacks essential to our cruising plans, we made our way to Annapolis, where our seagoing vessel awaited us at a dock reachable only through a gated community. (A gated community of pirates, I was hoping, but it was far too tidy.) We set sail in plenty of time to enjoy sunset over Maryland from the water, to the accompaniment of BB King and Sam Adams. But soon we decided in favor of silent running, the better to enjoy the night sky. The crew (them) and the onlooking loafers (me) discussed internet dating (theirs, not mine - two of them had independently dated the same sailboat owner from the same site) and the difficulties of finding potential partners who love sailing. This surprised me: who wouldn’t like sailing, I wondered - they’d have to be nuts! Of course, I hadn’t taken seasickness into consideration. Luckily none on board suffered from this so we were able to enjoy ourselves on the water until 11:30 at night - past our weekday bedtimes, but well worth the sacrifice of sleep.

The most memorable moments were passing by freighters and container ships that came upon us unexpectedly and quickly, suddenly looming over us and blocking out all the stars with their huge, black forms. A pilot boat, tiny in comparison, buzzed around the base of one Fearless Captain Steve got on the radio and made contact with their captains (one of them a woman) in order to check their courses and keep out of their way. We did indeed make it back to port safely, even with me at the wheel. Following captain’s orders I took the helm, my only directions being “stay between the red and the green lights.” When the lights were far away on the coastline and we still at sea this was easy, but they came upon us as rapidly as had the ships and soon I saw they were rather large posts with lights and, in some cases, birdnests affixed to the tops ten feet above the water. It would definitely not be good to run into these. “Don’t run into those,” was the crew’s helpful instruction at this point. Luckily, as the strait narrowed and we found ourselves surrounded with boats packed in like sardines, but all sensibly tied up for the night long before, someone more knowledgeable took the wheel and saved us all from certain disaster, and me from certain embarassment.

The rest of the week continued as it had started, me transcribing tapes during the day and attending the occasional lecture (the next one on fieldwork in Jamaica and Afghanistan). I couldn’t believe how quickly the time had passed when all of a sudden I found myself in Friday, my last day in Washington. I celebrated with a lunch with Carolina and her boss at WRI, a friend of my dad’s. “Dan’s cool, you should meet him,” my dad had said. “Dan is so cool,” Carolina’s coworkers had confirmed at happy hour last week. With that many coolness reviews, I certainly had to meet Dan. They were right: he was cool.

After that, I realized I’d spent two weeks in the Library of Congress and still hadn’t seen the main reading room, which also had many major coolness reviews. So I went up to see. Again, they hadn’t lied. It was definitely worth seeing the towering marble columns topped with bronze statues with viewing galleries in between that looked like the choir loft for a Gothic cathedral, and the soaring dome filled with stained glass several stories above. Down on the floor, dark wooden desks and chairs were arranged in a circle around the reference desk in the center, and around the perimeter were arrayed the open stacks of reference books n two tiers. Never one to resist narrow, twisty staircases, I went up and circled the room a half-storey up instead. This certainly must be one of the top ten most attractive places to do library research (the NYPL main reading room is up there too). Now why, I wondered, do they always have to hide the performing arts books around in some flourescently-lit, windowless room with no personality? Did I pick the wrong field?? No, I didn’t, I was reminded once again by some folklore colleagues at the happy hour we attended at an Irish bar after work. Who else, after all, is likely to discuss their personal experience in combining breakdance and clogging over a hearty ale?

For the grand finale to my Washington week I wanted to take Carolina out to dinner, but she was sick. It turned out to be tonsilitis, of all things. I told my dad and he said, “Tonsilitis?? But you’re supposed to get that in the winter!” “Well, I guess she screwed up,” I responded. The result of this was that we stayed in, ordered out and watched a movie. So my trip went out less with a bang than with a pad thai.

Since I’ve been back in New York, it’s been pretty much what you’d expect, only transfered to my relatives’ Upper West Side apartment rather than my former Greenpoint flophouse digs. Have I been able to interview those elusive musicians? No. Have I gotten other things done? Yes, but mostly boring errands and shopping not worth writing about here. I have had just one fieldwork success. This was in meeting with a major tipico fan at the bodega he owns, just on the border of Bed-Stuy with Bushwick. Fermin is the kind of guy who commissions homenajes, songs of homage: you might remember I met him at a tipico gig about a month ago, recognizing his name from a song Maria Diaz recorded in his honor. When I arrived, I found him behind the counter of his corner store, surrounded by an array of candies, cigarettes, and calling cards. Customers came and went with their purchases: chips, soda, toothpaste, deoderant. He told me to come behind the counter, so I ducked under the plexiglass. Fermin offered me a chair in the corner next to the shampoo and the trash can and sent his assistant, a man who’d grown up down the street from him in San Jose de las Matas and arrived in New York just a month earlier, to get me a cold Presidente. He opened it on the counter’s edge, then decided it wasn’t cold enough and put it in the freezer again.

It was a challenge to do the interview there as Fermin worked and chatted with customers, and I only got a few of the questions done that I’d planned on asking him. However, in all other ways, the four hours I spent in this Bed-Stuy bodega were quite educational and entertaining. I listened as Fermin’s accountant went over a report from a health inspector, explaining the fines he’d have to pay: one for keeping items of a chemical nature on a shelf adjacent to items of a food nature; one for having a cat in the shop. “But if I didn’t have the cat, the place would be full of mice!” he objected. The accountant further explained that if he had an employee, he’d be obligated to pay him $12 an hour and give him two weeks’ vacation as well as health insurance. At this, both Fermin and his helper laughed: they knew no Dominican bodega employee anywhere in the city was earning this lofty sum, and none ever expected to, either. The bodega owners could never afford it, and the employees (whose English is generally nonexistent, and their education at a similar level) could never find a better job. “If you’re going to keep that cat here working for you, you’ll have to give her vacation time too. She might want to go to Florida for a couple of weeks,” I suggested.

A bit later, I exited the counter area in order to search for snacks to eat, and one of the guys in the store, those types that hang about hoping for a job to do, asked if I could help another guy in the store make a phone call. “I don’t speak enough English to know what he’s saying,” he explained. The other guy handed me his cell phone. “I need to talk to this guy Francisco, but I don’t speak any Spanish,” he told me. “No problem,” I said. “What do you want me to say?” “Well, his wife will answer, then ask for him. Tell him to be at Gates Avenue tomorrow morning.” “What time?” I wondered. “Oh, he’ll know.” “Who should I say is calling?” “Oh, he’ll know. But you can say Kevin if you want.” This all sounded fishy, but whatever. The wife answered, I told her I was calling on behalf of Kevin as a translator and relayed the message. “Where? At his house?” she asked, and I asked Kevin. “No, he knows where. Gates and Nostrand.” I translated this. “Oh yes, I know what this is about,” she confirmed. “Thanks, I’ll tell Francisco.” I hung up wondering just what kind of transaction I’d just set up. Was I a good Samaritan? Or a BAD Samaritan?

Back behind the counter, I realized that the radio station playing was actually a Santiago station, La Super Regional, and that we were listening to it thanks to a computer with Internet Fermin had set up behind the counter expressly for this purpose. I commented on this, and told him I’d been interviewed twice on just that station. “Really? That’s great! Let’s call them up and say hi!” So we did. The DJ on duty was one I hadn’t met before, but he knew who I was, and asked where I was and what I was up to. “I’m hanging out with Fermin in the most tipico bodega in all of Brooklyn!” I informed him, and he agreed the definition was correct. “But I’ll be back in Santiago in January. I hope you’ll be waiting for me,” I said. He said they would be “planning something big” to celebrate my return.

With all this excitement, needless to say, the interview didn’t go far. But I did get a couple of nice pictures of Fermin at work, and Fermin’s ring, which I liked. Other excitement of the week consisted of a Burmese food and Irish music night with friends from the Washington Square Harp & Shamrock Orchestra (“The Finest Irish Band Withing A 5-Block Radius of Washington Square”), which I played with in pre-DR times. When Ben and Amelia arrived, they were accompanied by a woman unknown to us, who Amelia introduced as “Someone I found in my building.” I thought she was kidding, but when I asked the person in question (actually named Anna) she confirmed that they’d met in an elevator this morning. She turned out to be from Serbia, but had lived in California for a year, where she worked as an au pair. She also confessed to having been annoyed when she first arrived in this country and discovered that Americans didn’t actually know where her country is. So boy was she surprised when we pulled out the two words we collectively knew in Serbo-Croatian (now artificially divided into Serbian and Croatian for political rather than linguistic reasons). For some reason, Scott knew how to say “appendix.” I knew how to say “nerd.” Best not to ask why.