Searching for Our Bohemian Past
[This is a blast from the sixteen-year-old past, talking about a still older past, from a column by the LA Times’ Patt Morrison of September 20, 1998.]
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At intervals of a half-century or so, a utopian spirit was known to move across the country. With its propulsion, people struck out from old homes and old ways for the newer, the better, the purer. The Transcendentalists at Brook Farm in New England. The Oneida community, remembered now for forks and spoons. The Amana colony, living on vestigially in side-by-side refrigerators. And, of course, the original rigid utopians, the “my way or the highway” crowd who disembarked from the Mayflower.
Later the utopian impulse would propel thousands to California, where we individualized it, secularized it and renamed it “the dream,” the way a single human has dreams and many humans have a vision. Here its motto became one man-one utopia, its altar the brick barbecue, its baptismal font the swimming pool. Its variants are Autopia, one man-one car in Walt’s dream-world playland; fruitopia, the wacky fringe that plays center field for California, and dystopia, any place where a dream fails the dreamer or a vision succeeds so well it tyrannizes its visionaries.
Utopia, fruitopia or dystopia, Southern California laid claim to: the Elysia nudist colony, which thrived furtively above Tujunga. Gaylord Wilshire, the silk-hatted socialist millionaire and early health-food connoisseur, who published a utopian political newspaper; the richest street in Los Angeles bears his name. The Polish actress Helena Modjeska and her titled husband, who started a rustic retreat in Anaheim; it failed because none of its residents knew the first thing about farming. England’s Fabians, who found a warmer welcome in Pasadena. The socialist Llano del Rio cooperative colony in the Antelope Valley, which was briefly home to Aldous Huxley, whose novels swung between utopian and dystopian and who summed up the envy and the awfulness of Los Angeles in his observation that “the writer of ‘The Beverly Hillbillies’ earns more in a week than I do in a year.” Read more
Lionel Rolfe’s Literary LA Back in Print at Amazon.com
We are pleased to announce that Boryanabooks has brought back the expanded paperback edition of Lionel Rolfe’s Literary LA,
Now available in paperback from Amazon.com
Los Angeles as a hotbed of writers, bohemians, mad poets, exiles and refugees from every form of political and emotional oppression surfaces again with the third edition of Literary LA. There has always been another side to the self-promotional glitter the city is best known for, and this book tells that story. Literary LA was originally published in 1981 by Chronicle Books in San Francisco. A revised edition, In Search of Literary LA, appeared ten years later. To mark the millennium, California Classics expanded the study, with new emphasis on the bohemian and apocalyptic streams in Los Angeles writing, and including additional chapters by John Ahouse and Julia Stein. This is the full text of that expanded edition, released under the imprint of Boryanabooks. Those who helped to weave this literary tapestry were, like many who take hold in Los Angeles, often transients, literary gypsies, bohemians and writers in imposed or self-imposed exile. Among the authors and book people discussed, frequently through the haze of one of the city’s coffeehouses, are Oscar Zeta Acosta, Charles Bukowski, Henry Miller, Ken Kesey, Carey McWilliams, Charles Lummis, Jacob Zeitlin, Louis Adamic, Nathanael West, Robinson Jeffers, Malcolm Lowry, Thomas and Heinrich Mann, Upton Sinclair, John Steinbeck, Aldous Huxley, Jack London, Theodore Dreiser, and many others. Journalist and author Lionel Rolfe grew up in European-influenced surroundings in Los Angeles. Through the early postwar years, his mother, the late pianist Yaltah Menuhin, hosted an at-home salon that offered a solace for musicians and other creative artists-in-exile. Much of what Rolfe writes has its roots in his own childhood impressions or the recollections of family members and visitors to his boyhood home.
Is My Mother Calling Me?
By Beatlick Pamela Hirst
Before Daddy died, I can remember Mama at the ironing board, ironing sheets. This was before air conditioning and the white nylon sheers puffed wisps of warm atmosphere through the bedroom window, which was dim to my eyes, after leaving the dazzle of June daylight.
I could smell the new steam iron for which she bought special distilled water. No tap water. Mama was a nurse, she made hospital corners and she had a way of turning down the sheets and fluffing up the pillows that made my bed look so inviting. I just wanted to jump in, asked if I could and she generously nodded. Read more
Fritz Joubert Duquesne: Boer Avenger, German Spy, Munchausen Fantasist
“Col. Fritz du Quesne, a fugitive from justice, is wanted by His Majesty’s government for trial on the following charges: Murder on the high seas; the sinking and burning of British ships; the burning of military stores, warehouses, coaling stations, conspiracy, and the falsification of Admiralty documents.” He carried on hostile operations against the British government in various parts of the world under the following names: Fred, Fredericks, Capt. Claude Staughton, Col. Bezan, von Ricthofen, Piet Niacud, etc. His correct and full name is Fritz Joubert Marquis du Quesne. Prior to the war he was known as Capt. Fritz du Quesne, a big game hunter, author, explorer and lecturer.
-London Daily Mail, May 27, 1919
He is one of the most desperate and daring criminals we have ever had here.
His adventures read like a romance.
– Abraham I. Rorke, New York City Assistant District Attorney,
New York Evening Post, August 21, 1920.
On January 2, 1942, 33 members of a Nazi spy ring headed by Frederick Joubert Duquesne were sentenced to serve a total of over 300 years in prison. They were brought to justice after a lengthy espionage investigation by the FBI.
-Federal Bureau of Investigation, Duquesne Spy Ring, March 12, 1985
- Captain Fritz Joubert Duquesne, Boar soldier, circa 1900
Leslie Evans
Frederick “Fritz” Joubert Duquesne (1877-1956) was a South African Boer who led an astonishing life on both sides of the law. Officer in the Boer army in the war with England, many times an escaped prisoner, pimp, newspaper reporter, foreign correspondent, novelist, spy and saboteur in South America where he blew up British ships during World War I, adviser on big game hunting to Theodore Roosevelt, publicist for Joseph Kennedy’s movie business. He feigned paralysis for five months to avoid deportation to England where he faced execution for the deaths of British seamen. And finally, he was the best known member of the largest Nazi spy ring broken up by the FBI during World War II.
Beyond his real exploits, Duquesne lived under some thirty aliases. He invented and reinvented his past at will, claiming to have been the greatest swordsman in Europe, attaching his ancestry to this or that aristocratic clan that momentarily appealed to him, granting himself military titles and medals, and producing endless accounts of battles, some of which he actually took part in. His most famous claim was to have guided a German submarine to sink the HMS Hampshire in 1916 at the height of World War I, killing Field Marshal Herbert Kitchener, Britain’s Secretary of State for War and the head of Britain’s armed forces. Read more
“Amigos” By Irma M. Olmedo
By IRMA M OLMEDO
There were three, three of them, three of them chasing me, and even though the cobbled stoned street was filled with people talking and laughing, no one seemed to notice or try to stop them. I sped down the garbage-strewn sidewalk, across the street with its cracked, uneven pavement, around a bend. The three mangy dogs raced close behind me. I quickened my pace, crossed the next street, evading the flashing cars that honked their horns as I darted in front, dodged between the uneven hedges beside a mustard yellow wooden house and an abandoned car, its rusted fender dangling from the frame, fled to the back yard thick with overgrown grass and weeds. The three dogs continued the rapid chase, speeding right behind me, faster and faster, just a few feet away now, nipping at my exposed ankles. I should have worn my tenis rather than my old open-toed chanclas this morning so I could outrun them and get away. Straight ahead I dropped my grocery bags in the weeds and trying to catch my breath, I grabbed a low tree branch full of tamarindo, pulled myself up just in time to escape the gray skeletal mutt closest to me. But the branch gave way. Now I was falling, falling, falling, the dogs barking wildly below, their sharp teeth exposed, their eyes flaming against the bright sunshine. Suddenly I felt a tug at my arm, someone was shaking me. “Maria, Maria, wake up, wake up, you’re having a nightmare,” Cheito, my husband, whispered reassuringly. My heart was racing, I was sweating, exhausted, out of breath. Again, the nightmare of the dogs.
The nightmare of the dogs had been an ongoing terror in my adult life. The chase was always the essence of the nightmare, though the mangy dogs, in swift pursuit, never caught me. I couldn’t recall any incident that might have triggered this fear that followed me from early childhood. If I saw a dog crouching on the narrow sidewalk in the cobbled stoned streets of Old San Juan, I would quickly cross to the other side, even if the dog were on a leash. The dog’s size was irrelevant to the magnitude of my fear. Large or small, it was all the same to me. And if a dog looked directly at me, I would avert my gaze. I knew they smelled my fear and were emboldened by it. Why would they bark only at me and not at others who passed them by?
It didn’t help that the dogs in my barrio were often left to fend for themselves. People had been hungry during the war, but dogs were famished. Barrio families didn’t have leftovers. Meat and even bones were scarce. Starving dogs were angry dogs, running in packs and scavenging for whatever they could find. Scavengers were not selective.
The war ended but people in my barrio remained poor. Many of my neighbors considered leaving Puerto Rico to look for jobs. “Mira, en Nueba Yol hay trabajo.” they said. “There’s work in New York!” “No hay que hablar inglés para trabajar en las fábricas.” “You don’t have to speak English to work in the factories.” “No necesitas experiencia.” “Puedes ganar hasta un peso la hora.” “Forty dollars a week.” I heard these words up and down the streets of my barrio and in the local bodegas.
Forty pesos a week. Mucho dinero! Cheito earned only 17 a week working at the local print shop, muy poquito for a man with three children. Every payday after he played the lotería to try his luck, the money was even less. No wonder he ended up in the barra drinking rum and trying to cheer up before coming home to face me. “What’s an hombre supposed to do if he has bad luck? Surely, I could understand that! Didn’t I always say I’d had some luck in marrying him?” Only from my inflection could he guess what kind of luck I meant.
My sister, Goyita was convinced that I would be better off in Nueba Yol. “Remember that even as a widow, I made the trip myself 5 years ago and got a factoría job sewing brassieres,” she reminded me. “I managed to make enough pesos to bring my three children six months later. I even met a good man and got married. Now we’re all living comfortably in Los Proyectos. We got a 3 bedroom clean apartment without rats and roaches and with a toilet and bath inside. Why, if you come with Don Cheito he would get a job and a clean proyecto apartment, maybe even in the same building in Losaida.” That was what Puerto Ricans later called the Lower East Side of NY.
So she and I began to scheme about how I could make the move with my family. “I could pay for your plane ticket, Maria, ” Goyita offered. “ And Cheito’s sister can pay for his. You can live with me until Cheito finds a job and an apartment. Sooner or later, all of you will live pretty well. All you need to do in Nueba Yol is get a job, maybe two, and work very hard.”
So this is how I became acquainted with dogs in Nueba Yol. Those dogs were different from the mangy strays crouching on the corners of my Old San Juan barrio looking for a handout or chasing me in my nightmares. Nueba Yol dogs led the good life, strutting down the streets on a leash with a rhinestone collar, wearing a crocheted wool coat in winter to keep warm. Imagine that! People really made coats for dogs! No wonder there were so many factoría jobs in Nueba Yol if even dogs had to have coats. And no wonder Nueba Yol dogs behaved so well — they rarely barked at passersby. They weren’t hungry, so why make a fuss?
Nueba Yol was filled with surprises. Even shopping at the huge, brightly lit supermercado nearby was an adventure. My children loved those stores where people filled carts with their groceries. Products were displayed looking so fresh and attractive that I wanted to buy a little of everything. And, oh, the choices! Even if you just wanted to buy oatmeal, what my family usually ate for breakfast, there were many different kinds to pick from: instant or regular, with or without sugar, with cinnamon or pieces of dried apple, in big boxes or individual packets. The bread aisle was also a wonder. There were breads in all colors and shapes, white, brown, black, round or long, sliced or whole, sweet or sour, mixed with nuts or raisins. In my Puerto Rico barrio I could buy either pan de agua or pan dulce, both of which I loved, but you had to eat them in one or two days because they would quickly get stale. American breads would last for weeks, packaged in nicely decorated sealed wrappers, sometimes with pictures of healthy-looking athletes. Unfortunately, the supermercado didn’t have many boricua foods. For that you had to go to La Marqueta under the Williamsburg Bridge, where you could buy plátanos, spices for the sofrito to season my Puerto Rican beans and other things like really good Goya rice and Bustelo coffee for surviving those frigid New York winters.
What I couldn’t understand was why Americanos ate dogs or cats. A large aisle in the supermercado had cans with pictures of dogs or cats. In Puerto Rico even hungry people never ate dogs or cats. Dogs and cats could be pets but if they were abandoned strays, no one would even want to go near them. But here in Nueba Yol I heard people order hot dogs on the street. They looked like sausages and must have been made out of dog meat or why call them hot dogs? The men at the pushcarts would put a sausage in a long roll of white bread, add onions, some green stuff, ketchup and mustard and sell the hot dog to hungry customers who were always in a hurry. Those hot dogs were especially popular with Americano kids who bought them from the carts rather than eat the lunches served in the school cafeteria. I couldn’t understand why so many Americanos loved hot dogs. I also found it strange to see so many well-dressed Americanos filling up their grocery carts with cans with the pretty smiling dogs or cats on the labels. How cruel to put pictures of happy animals on the cans and boxes! Americanos son locos, that’s for sure. They had crazy ways of doing things. But who knows? Maybe that meat was nutritious. Americanos were much fatter than Puertorriqueños and always looked hearty and well fed. Look at how tall the teenagers got! Few Puertorriqueño kids got to be that tall and husky. It had to be the Americano food, including the cans with the pictures of the cats and dogs.
I hesitated to buy any of that meat for quite a few months. Sure, I was adjusting to the winter weather, to having to wear a coat, hat, gloves and boots whenever I went out in the frigid cold and snow. I was also learning English, important words like pliz, Sank you, esqiuz mi, I sorry, bery nice, mucho money. But eating cats and dogs was going to take more time to get used to. Maybe one day I would buy a can with a pretty dog on it and make a sofrito for it like I did with pig when I cooked it for Christmas in the campo where I grew up. I would mix it with a little onion, salt, garlic, pepper, olive oil, oregano, cilantro, and tomato sauce. That should make it taste pretty good, maybe almost like pork. I’d have to experiment first before feeding it to my family. Fortunately, Don Cheito was not a fussy eater. He was learning to eat what Americanos liked ever since he started working at the factoría. Maybe it didn’t matter to him if it was Puerto Rican pig or Nueba Yol dog as long as it was well seasoned and served with rice and beans, topped off with a strong cup of café con leche.
Maybe Americano dogs taste different from Puertorriqueño dogs, I reasoned. That must be why Americanos like the meat so much. Everyone in the familia joked about how doña Luisa treated her dog Baby, pampering him and feeding him the best food in the house. Doña Luisa never married but had always wanted children. Instead she got a cute little fluffy white puppy to keep her company and fill her empty childless household. Doña Luisa rarely left her 2nd floor tenement apartment on 116th Street in El Barrio because she didn’t want to leave Baby alone. Whenever there was a family party, a taxi would pick her and Baby up and take them home. Baby was too delicate to suffer the cold and snow, even with the coat she had knitted for him with the fur collar. “Baby eats just like a baby”, she’d say. She even got a machine to grind vegetables and meat real soft so Baby wouldn’t have to chew too hard and his tummy could digest the food well. Doña Luisa prided meself on how Americana she was becoming from having lived for so many years in Nueba Yol. I thought she was as loca as Americanos. Luisa had been in Nueba Yol too long to remember what dogs were really like.
One Friday night about six months after my arrival in Nueba Yol, I finally decided to experiment with the supermercado cans of dog meat. I prepared my sofrito first, mixing up 5 cloves of garlic, one chopped medium onion, 6 peppercorns, and some other herbs that I bought at the marqueta, cilantro, recaito, achiote for color. I chopped it all together, using my moltero to grind up the garlic, peppercorns and spices into a moist paste. I mixed everything in olive oil and sauteed it with tomato sauce in my big black caldero, adding 2 oregano leaves for additional flavor. Instead of salt, I decided to use olives and capers, which were already salty. As I cooked the sofrito, the criollo smell filled the entire second floor apartment, even seeping out into the hallway all the way to the broken elevator.
I had selected a medium sized can with a cute, smiling, brown dog on the label after watching which cans Americano shoppers liked best. I was pleased that it wasn’t too expensive since I always watched my food budget carefully. Don Cheito’s measly salary didn’t allow for luxuries and buying foods that Americanos liked was not a purchase I could defend to him.
Would the meat look like chicken, beef, or pork? What might it smell like? I opened the can with great anticipation. To my disappointment, the color was unremarkable. The smell was unpleasant and the brown mushy meat didn’t look at all appealing, but I could fix that with my sofrito. I might even add a little pique, the spicy picante salsa I made for special occasions.
For Cheito, dinnertime was the best hour of the day. His short, stocky frame and rotund belly attested to his love of a good meal. The aroma of the sofrito made him look forward to one of my specialties. One thing he knew for sure, I was a terrific cook. He especially liked my fricase de pollo, which I always seasoned to perfection, he’d say. The roast pork and arroz con gandules I cooked for Christmas were not bad either. And when I got together with my sisters Goyita and Milady to prepare pasteles and alcapurrias, stuffing them with pork, garbanzos and raisins, he fell in love all over again. “All a man really needs for a happy and fulfilled life is a wife who can prepare a good spread!” he’d often assert to his co-workers. “Maria is rarely adventuresome with her cooking, sticking faithfully to the traditional foods that she had prepared and eaten in her barrio. But that’s fine with me. I can even be satisfied with a hefty serving of plain rice and beans as long as the seasoning is just right. And Maria certainly knows how to prepare sofrito. “
Taking a cold beer out of the refrigerator, Don Cheito sat down, anticipating a new treat. He took a large mouthful of this new dish. He chewed a little and swallowed. He took another hefty mouthful, chewed it more slowly and swallowed it, a puzzled look on his face. He could taste my sofrito with the garlic, onions, and spices he loved. But, what, exactly, was that texture? It wasn’t chicken, pork, or steak. He had eaten rabbit and goat stew but this dish wasn’t that either. He was also fond of cuchifritos, made from various parts of the pig and sold in local cuchifrito stands on Delancey Street. He especially liked tripitas, “sweetbreads” his American coworkers called it, as they glanced suspiciously at it when he brought it to the factoria for lunch. “What a strange name for food for poor people,” he’d say. Though his co-workers politely turned him down when he offered them a taste, he was proud of the great variety of dishes that his fellow boricuas cooked from all parts of the pig. “Those Americanos sure don’t know what they were missing. Most of their dishes are rather bland and uninspired.”
This new dish that I had prepared looked a little like spaghetti sauce, but seemed to have a different texture than the ground beef I usually used. The whole family had learned to enjoy spaghetti and his coworkers often were impressed with how much better my spaghetti tasted than the kind their own wives made with the bottled Ragu sauce from the supermercado. I always added my own sofrito to the sauce, giving it a rather unique taste. After chewing the 3rd spoonful of this new dish, Don Cheito stopped. “Maria, what is this? What kind of food are you giving me? I don’t think you ever made anything like this before.”
“Ay, amor it’s only some food that los Americanos like to eat. I saw them buying cans of it at the supermercado and I thought you might want to try something different.”
“Americano food? Cans from the supermercado? What are you talking about? Let me see the can.”
“Here it is. See the picture of the cute brown dog on the label. Every week I saw Americanos buy these cans in the supermercado, so I figured I’d fix some up with the sofrito.”
“Ay, Dios mio Maria” he groaned after reading the label. “This is not dog meat. This is meat for dogs! Maria, people don’t eat it. Americanos buy it to feed their dogs!”
“What do you mean that los Americanos feed it to their dogs? Special meat for dogs? You mean Americano dogs don’t eat the leftovers like Puertorriqueño dogs? You mean people buy special foods in the supermercado for dogs? What about cats? I also saw cans with pretty kittens on the labels. You mean to tell me that all those cans are special food for cats too?”
I gritted me teeth, shook my head, and with a look of disgust dumped the meal in the trash. “What a waste of time, money, and sofrito!” I said aloud. “Los Americanos sure are locos if they have special foods for their pets! I’ll never become an Americana with their weird ways. Imagine, selling special foods in the supermercados for cats and dogs! I’ll have to tell Goyita and Milady about this so they don’t make the same mistake.”
Luckily, I had also made rice and beans. I fried two ripe plátanos and used the extra sofrito for bacalao, the dried codfish that I always kept handy for emergencies. Cheito and the kids wouldn’t go hungry.
Eventually the dog food dinner became a big family joke that got better and more elaborate each time it was retold. I even learned to laugh about it. It was one of many anecdotes in a long line of events, some humorous and others unpleasant, that were expanded in the retelling, events that Cheito and I experienced as we learned to become Americanos.
Becoming Americanos came to an end when Cheito and I decided to return to Puerto Rico in 1970. Puertorriqueños in the Lower East Side and the New York Barrio had been saving their pesos to return to their viejo San Juan. The economic boom of the late 1960s became an incentive for Goyita who led the return for my family: “Mira, Maria, you should see the beautiful casitas that are being built in Levittown; they’re made out of cement, not wood, so they can withstand the hurricanes. They have green lawns in front and gardens in back for growing tomates, beans, mangos, bananas, lemons, whatever you wanted to grow there. If you return to Puerto Rico, Cheito can set up a printing press next to his casita and now that he knows ingles he can print all kinds of documents, even bilingual ones.”
So we returned and moved to Levittown and Cheito built his print shop in the marquesina, the carport attached to the house. No need for a carport since he had no car and had never learned to drive in Nueba Yol. Like many Neuyorricans, he had taken the F train back and forth to work every day for years. Since Levittown was a new community, he anticipated getting all kinds of print jobs as people opened up businesses in their carports. I discovered a clientele for my Puerto Rican specialties and homemade sofrito. Younger women had full time jobs and little time to make traditional meals from scratch so I would sell my homemade specialties.
Much had changed in Puerto Rico in the two decades since we’d left and Levittown was the place for change. On the main street two blocks from our house was a huge, air-conditioned supermercado just like the ones in Nueba Yol, with aisles lined with many choices of coffees, breads, beans, and other products. Meats were packaged in sturdy cartons or sealed in cellophane with prices and weights marked clearly on attractive labels. The best part, however, was not only did these supermercados have Americano products, but Puertorriqueño ones as well. They even had cans with pretty dogs and cats on them! Of course, unlike in Nueba Yol, the animal aisle was tiny. Los Puertorriqueños were becoming just like Americanos, but not quite. Their dogs still ate rice and beans, pork, and other leftovers from their owner’s tables. And I vowed I would certainly not make the same mistake I had made in Nueba Yol. I would not buy one of those cans and cook it, not even with good sofrito!
Many home owners in Levittown were also from Nueba Yol. Like in Nueba Yol, they spoke Spanglish, español and ingles. They were the puertorriqueños who had made it and were coming back home, some bringing dogs and cats with them. Backyards had casitas with signs sporting names like “Grande,” “Pepe,” “Negro,” “Macho” or “Superdog”. The bigger houses with huge fences had signs proclaiming “Cuidado Perro!” “Beware of Dog!” for the watch dogs that wealthy people kept as security against burglars.
“Mira, these Levittown homeowners quickly figured out that big dogs are good guard dogs for their property” Cheito would say. “In Nueba Yol, we were never burglarized. Everyone knew that only poor people lived in the proyectos and what could be stolen from the poor? But Levittown is different. It’s wealthier than Cataño, that barrio next door of people with little money who had never left Puerto Rico.” Neighbors often recounted stories about Cataño burglars breaking into Levittown houses to steal televisions, record players, whatever they could carry.
I had stopped having nightmares about dogs for a long time. I rarely saw loose hungry dogs barking at people in the streets as most were confined to their back yards. Occasionally a mangy stray wandered the outskirts of Levittown, sometimes around the beach where family outings were popular during hot summer weekends. People cooked their roast pork, their pasteles and alcapurrias, their arroz con gandules, and topped off the feast with coconuts knocked down from the palm trees. The leftovers from the criollo banquets, piled up in overflowing trashcans, were enough food for dogs to feast on.
In the fall, however, the number of strays in Levittown grew. People thought that the dogs were coming from the beaches. The neighbors would say “It’s the people from Cataño who are to blame; since they’re unable to control the strays, they truck them to Levittown. They know Levittown is better able to feed hungry dogs.” I knew that Levittown had good town services, including dogcatchers; if residents got too annoyed with the dogs, they would get rid of them. Cataño had never had dogcatchers. They had bigger prey to catch, drug pushers, burglars, and gang bangers, for example. Dogs were not part of that agenda.
Near the end of December, Cheito and I were expecting our daughter, Mima and her husband Bob for the Christmas holidays. Mima had moved to Wisconsin after marrying a gringo professor who loved to swim and snorkel. Trips to Puerto Rico were a special treat, especially around Christmas when Wisconsin winters made them long for sand and surf. I looked forward to preparing the special holiday dishes that Mima loved and Bob was learning to appreciate. Cheito would be sure to share the story of my dog food meal, a story that he always spiced up the same way I had spiced up the meat with my sofrito.
Mima always thought coming home was great since I would cook her favorite foods. Cheito and I would regale them with neighborhood gossip and political controversies. Mima and Bob enjoyed listening to Cheito’s outrage at the neighbor’s politics: “Can you believe that fool favors Statehood for Puerto Rico? Everyone in his right mind knows that the Commonwealth is the best future for the island.” I would forcefully challenge his arguments. “Puerto Rico needs to be independent,” I’d proclaim. “My years in Nueba Yol taught me that los Americanos are locos. We Puertorriqueños can never be Americanos!“
For several evenings, Cheito and I furtively put the dinner leftovers into a Ziploc bag and stored it in the refrigerator. I didn’t want Mima raising questions as to why I was saving leftovers. I preferred to have her think that this was our way of recycling since leftovers in outdoor trash cans in the heat would stink, overpowering the sweet smell of the lilacs that lined the front of the patio. One cool but humid evening, Mima went out to sit on the patio to enjoy the pleasant breeze after sundown and hear the singing of the coquis. The flowery bushes exuded a sweet smell in the mild evening air. The street was rather quiet. Most families were indoors watching television or preparing for the big feasts of Nochebuena, Christmas Eve. Cheito came out with me close behind. We couldn’t pretend anymore. Standing erect just behind the patio gate and cupping his hand to his mouth, Cheito shouted, “Amigooos, Amigooos!” All of a sudden a pack of dogs appeared by the patio, barking and wagging their tails. I handed Cheito the plastic bag with the leftovers. He carefully distributed the scraps in plastic bowls and set them before the dogs, who greedily attacked every scrap of the feast. Cheito watched and smiled.
Then, he strolled back to the patio with a sheepish look on his face. “I don’t know what I’m going to do with Maria”, he complained. “I tell her that if she’s so afraid of dogs we shouldn’t feed them because they’ll just keep returning. At first it was only one or two strays. Now all the dogs in the neighborhood spread the word about where to get a good banquet. Maria, I can’t figure you out,” he shouted to me, with an amused grin on his face.
“Ay, nena” I whispered to Mima. “Did you ever look into the eyes of a hungry child? Well, the eyes of a hungry dog have the exact same expression. Ay bendito! I feel sorry for those poor orphan dogs that no one cares about or cares for. Now that we have enough food to have leftovers, what else do I want with it? Why should the leftovers be wasted and dumped in the trash when I can share them? I don’t have to go to the supermercado to buy fancy food for these dogs. These amigos puertorriqueños eat exactly what we eat. They even like my sofrito!”
Sometimes It Was Fun
By PAMELA ADAMS HIRST
My poor parents; they were both so weak, so damaged. The war damaged Daddy and Daddy damaged Mama. I’m a baby boomer. When my sister was born, four years after me, the violence began. Today they would call it post traumatic stress syndrome. But back then they called it shell shocked.
Sometimes it was fun hiding from Daddy. I remember once when Mama said we were going to hide, said we were going to spend the night up in the attic. We made pallets on the floor. It was fun, just like when we went visiting out in the country to see my cousins Patsy and Gill at the horse farm.
It was like camping. Not that we knew what camping was. But we had an old oil lamp left over from the blizzard the winter my sister was born. Mama brought the bucket up from under the kitchen sink and the toilet paper, too.
And besides, up in the attic it was cheerful; we played cards and I Spy while the shadows danced around on the raw planks like fairies. When we went to bed we all curled up together like spoons.
Late that night we heard my father come in the kitchen door. We stayed really quiet. He spent a lot of time down there running water in the sink. He never once called out our names. Read more
Lionel’s Memories From A Menuhin Past
This is a picture of my mother, Yaltah Menuhin, a bit before she produced me, her greatest opus. (Just kidding, honest. Kidding on the dime, isn’t that what they call it?) Anyway, Larry Young of Ventura, whose family was close with mine, found this and sent it to me. Below is another picture he sent me of my uncle Yehudi with his first wife Nola and daughter Zamira.
Photog Susan McRae Begins To Love Birds Perhaps Too Much
Photog Susan McRae just got back from a photo workshop in Bosque del Apache, a nature and wildlife preserve in southern part of New Mexico, where she has moved after years of living in Los Angeles. Knowing that Lionel Rolfe, the editor of Boryanabooks, has an unreasonable love of dinosaurs and their descendants, she sent in these photos. This one of McRae and her newfound friend was taken by Jerry Goffe, one of the instructors at the workshop. Her friend is a Harris hawk, raised by a raptor breeder. All the others are her photos. And these are all wild birds. Below, the Harris hawk in flight. Read more
Attorney Les Zador: When Have You Been (Legally) Poisoned By That Dinner Out
Today, I want to talk to you about the liability of food suppliers, particularly restaurants, for food poisoning. Food poisoning?
It happens to most of us at least once or twice in our lifetimes. We go to a restaurant or a fast food outlet. We order the fish or whatever; and we may or may not notice that the taste is a little off as we unsuspectingly consume the adulterated food. After finishing, we don’t give it a second thought until it hits us; and then we spend the better part of the next 24 hours hunched over the toilet praying to God for it to be over and, in many cases, heading over or getting someone to drive us to the emergency room.
Whoever has been through the process will know in his or her gut (pun intended) that it was the lousy food consumed at the local fast food eatery that did him or her in; but how do you prove this? In the typical case, someone will check in at the hospital, have a battery of tests run resulting in a formidable hospital bill, all the while missing several days of work. It only stands to reason that the person who has suffered and been inconvenienced thus should want to be compensated. But then the fun starts when the eatery claims that it wasn’t its product that made the victim ill, that nobody else got sick from eating the food on the day in question, and that the illness was obviously caused by something else. I’ve been through this with restaurants, etc., a few times. Read more
The World’s Greatest Vegan Bartender, Mai Tai Mati, Meets Up With Talia Caldwell
Here’s a couple of Lionel Rolfe’s favorites–Mai Tai Mati, the world’s greatest Vegan bartender, and her friend Talia Caldwell, the famous basketball center from the UC Berkeley.
Honey on the road to San Francisco with some of the Spanish explorers
NOTES FROM ABOVE GROUND
By Honey van Blossom
(Honey is a Belgian Marxist former strip-tease artiste)
"Cities of the Golden Gate," Raymond Dabb Yelland, 1893. Most illustrations can be enlarged by clicking on them.
Prologue to the story of the Spanish exploration and settlement of California
Seasonal migrations of animals now extinct in California probably created the roads the native people used before the Spanish land exploration of California. “The heyday of giant mammals in North America was the middle and late Pleistocene, an epoch that started 2.6 million years ago and ended 11,700 years ago, around the time the Earth was thawing out from the Ice Age. The gigantic beasts, which migrated from Asia across a now-vanished land bridge called Beringia, are known as Rancholabrean megafauna, after the famous La Brea tar pits in downtown Los Angeles — the graveyard of thousands of saber-toothed tigers, giant bison and other extinct animals.”[1]
The seasonal migrations of the large mammals may have created the substantial roads used by the indigenous people after their arrival.[2]
Paul S. Martin and Richard G. Klein argue that Paleoindian over-hunting led to the extinction of the megafauna.[3] Others argue that climate change was responsible for mammoth and mastodon extinctions. As the last major glaciation ended around 12,000 years ago, climate warmed too quickly for the megafauna to adapt.
