*this is an excerpt from a bigger piece I'm writing about my friendship with my good friend, J.J.
I think our names—first, middle, and last name(s) along with the names that we weren’t ultimately given by our parents—are significant in knowing someone. I’m not considering this from a numerology sense but in a melodic-spirit way. Perhaps it’s our minds, specifically mine, creating yet another distinctly human construct (such as linear time, malice, or God), but I believe people somehow or another end up behaving the way their names sound coupled with the way their faces look. It’s just one of my many unscientific theories of life, something J.J. and I excel in manufacturing. One of my favorite all-time J.J. Theories On Life is that you can’t trust a people, a culture, that lives in a peninsula, eats a form of soup yet doesn’t have some form of eating or soaking utility similar or equivalent to bread or a tortilla.
But back to names, J.J. and I are similar in that we were named after our fathers. It could be argued that we were destined towards a rebellious nature shortly after we were popped out of our mothers’ wombs once we were yawningly named after our dads—like we felt compelled, throughout our pubescence and young adulthood especially, to be that much more different than our spawners.
J.J.’s birth-given first name is Gerald (for his privacy, I won’t put out his full name). Instead of going by Junior, Gerald Jr. or Jerry Jr., his family chose to call him J.J.
My full name is Juan Manuel Alvarado Valdivia. My father, to his credit, did not want to name me after him but wanted to call me Huascar. In Quechua, the language the Incans and their Andean descendents presently use (my family es Peruano), the name means “Sun of Joy”. Huascar was the second to last Incan emperor, dethroned by his half-brother, Atahualpa, in a bloody civil war that occurred when the Spanish conquistadors landed on the empire. Huascar, being the last full-blooded Incan emperor, was said to be the favored ruler by the majority of the Incan peasants. It could be that these reasons were why my father wanted to name me after him. He was talked out of by my mom since it was an unusual name, even in Peru. Plus, my paternal grandfather was also named Juan so there was a sexy line of succession to continue (it ends with me). My cousins tell me I should be thankful because a popular juerga, a slang term in my ancestral homeland, is huasca, which means to be shit-faced drunk.
At times, I believe that even though I wasn’t named after the second to last Incan emperor, that I took and churn within me the spirit that the name would have entailed.
Sunday, January 25, 2009
Monday, January 12, 2009
A New Year (or Tangy Titties)
The sun was sheeny past the windows that looked out over Judy and Carlisle’s backyard. The expansive view provided a glimpse of the backyards of at least four Victorians, each a different vibrant hue and picturesque with the clear blue sky behind them. “You’re not done with the tour yet,” Carlisle called out in his thick Southern accent as his shoes thumped on the wooden stairwell that led to the back.
With his gray Fedora hat a la Tom Landry perched on my noggin’, I stopped my petting and cooing of Rosie the pug and stood up from the rug. I stepped out into the sun and descended the steps that ran alongside an orange tree. Past the tree was a tiny fenced off area that appeared to be a forgotten garden, the leaves of some plants sagging and frayed at the ends, small red-orange tomatoes rotting on the lush soil.
Carlisle stood in the middle of the concrete patio beneath the tree. He grinned and held his arms out.
“Not bad, huh?” he asked as we peered up at the tree, its oranges and foliage glimmering in the sunlight.
“I’m gonna have to come out here when I’m high!” I replied.
“It gets better. Check this out,” he said before turning to open a door which led into a low-hanging garage, beneath his new home.
A fluorescent light flicked to life as I followed him in. He walked off to a corner and marched back, his head bent, with a five-foot long pole in hand. At one end was a cone-sized basket of sorts with what looked like a miniature rake protruding out on one side.
We stepped back into the warm blanket of sun as Carlisle turned a knob on the pole to extend it. With both hands firmly grasping it, he tilted it to the heavens. My jaw hung open in wonder as he negotiated an orange within the basket, then reared back to use the rake-part to pull the orange off its branch.
“And there you have an orange,” Carlisle said as he brought the pole down to ground level and allowed the fruit to roll off and onto the pavement. “Normally, you’d have another person on that end, grabbing them, putting them in a basket to speed the picking process.”
“That’s cool, man. What is that thing called?”
“A harvester,” he replied as he set it back against the house.
He walked back beneath the tree, plucked an orange from it and bent over to pick up the one from the ground. He handed them to me and picked one for himself.
We took a step to look out over the garden as Rosie descended the stairs. She took a rest at the bottom, licking her snout and staring at us in a lazy Sunday way. Carlisle told me that he wanted to eventually knock the elfin fence (it was about three feet high) so he wouldn’t feel so separate from it. For the time being, until he and Judy figured out what they were going to do with the space, they were keeping the gate that led out into the garden shut because Rosie would eat those rotting tomatoes. I chuckled since I remembered how fond she was of eating any crap we crossed on the sidewalks of the Mission, whenever I took her for a stroll.
We conversed about school, about how he wanted to cut back on his class load to have “more of a life” in the coming semester. I yacked about how I was trying to make the best of my vacation from classes by giving myself strict deadlines on finishing the books I was reading. While we spoke, Carlisle started to toss and catch his orange over his shoulders like a sideshow clown, his lips puckered and blue eyes bulging goofily. The juggle itch sifted into me and I started to chuck my oranges up in the air. A carnival tune began to toot in my brain. I couldn’t do anything nifty like Carlisle so in a move that recalled my pubescent years, I slipped one then both oranges underneath my Simpsons shirt to create pointy breasts which I would later dub "tangy titties". After I nestled them around for symmetricality, I turned to look up at Carlisle.
“Can you tell I’m sexually frustrated?” I quipped before we started laughing, the giddy sun and blue sky bereft of worry clouds getting to us.
With his gray Fedora hat a la Tom Landry perched on my noggin’, I stopped my petting and cooing of Rosie the pug and stood up from the rug. I stepped out into the sun and descended the steps that ran alongside an orange tree. Past the tree was a tiny fenced off area that appeared to be a forgotten garden, the leaves of some plants sagging and frayed at the ends, small red-orange tomatoes rotting on the lush soil.
Carlisle stood in the middle of the concrete patio beneath the tree. He grinned and held his arms out.
“Not bad, huh?” he asked as we peered up at the tree, its oranges and foliage glimmering in the sunlight.
“I’m gonna have to come out here when I’m high!” I replied.
“It gets better. Check this out,” he said before turning to open a door which led into a low-hanging garage, beneath his new home.
A fluorescent light flicked to life as I followed him in. He walked off to a corner and marched back, his head bent, with a five-foot long pole in hand. At one end was a cone-sized basket of sorts with what looked like a miniature rake protruding out on one side.
We stepped back into the warm blanket of sun as Carlisle turned a knob on the pole to extend it. With both hands firmly grasping it, he tilted it to the heavens. My jaw hung open in wonder as he negotiated an orange within the basket, then reared back to use the rake-part to pull the orange off its branch.
“And there you have an orange,” Carlisle said as he brought the pole down to ground level and allowed the fruit to roll off and onto the pavement. “Normally, you’d have another person on that end, grabbing them, putting them in a basket to speed the picking process.”
“That’s cool, man. What is that thing called?”
“A harvester,” he replied as he set it back against the house.
He walked back beneath the tree, plucked an orange from it and bent over to pick up the one from the ground. He handed them to me and picked one for himself.
We took a step to look out over the garden as Rosie descended the stairs. She took a rest at the bottom, licking her snout and staring at us in a lazy Sunday way. Carlisle told me that he wanted to eventually knock the elfin fence (it was about three feet high) so he wouldn’t feel so separate from it. For the time being, until he and Judy figured out what they were going to do with the space, they were keeping the gate that led out into the garden shut because Rosie would eat those rotting tomatoes. I chuckled since I remembered how fond she was of eating any crap we crossed on the sidewalks of the Mission, whenever I took her for a stroll.
We conversed about school, about how he wanted to cut back on his class load to have “more of a life” in the coming semester. I yacked about how I was trying to make the best of my vacation from classes by giving myself strict deadlines on finishing the books I was reading. While we spoke, Carlisle started to toss and catch his orange over his shoulders like a sideshow clown, his lips puckered and blue eyes bulging goofily. The juggle itch sifted into me and I started to chuck my oranges up in the air. A carnival tune began to toot in my brain. I couldn’t do anything nifty like Carlisle so in a move that recalled my pubescent years, I slipped one then both oranges underneath my Simpsons shirt to create pointy breasts which I would later dub "tangy titties". After I nestled them around for symmetricality, I turned to look up at Carlisle.
“Can you tell I’m sexually frustrated?” I quipped before we started laughing, the giddy sun and blue sky bereft of worry clouds getting to us.
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