paulyvegas.com
STATEMENT OF PURPOSE
I, Pauly Vegas, blog because I must.
I am a lover of neither the form, nor the technology.
Charles Bukowski never did this, not with his East L.A hookers.
Henry Miller never blogged about Montmartre whores.
Sweet Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarity, too busy dancing to blog about Mexican brothels.
All the great literary whoremongers come and gone, who wasted breath to document it like this? In this...airless technology?
I, Pauly Vegas, do not count myself in the above literary class. Nor do I feel the need to purge my soul to the world. Ah, but the poet craves immortality.
And the guidebooks say: Concern thyself with keywords, backlinks, metatags.
Thus, this fucking blog.
I wrote a book, PURA VIDA. You can find it at PAULYVEGAS.COM. The following is an excerp, explaining the meaning of Pura Vida.
What will follow, periodically, will be updates from the life of your humble narrator, Pauly Vegas. I make you these promises, Good Reader.
You will not be bored.
There will be no quarter offered, no apologies given.
This is one man's Good Life.
Bold Hearts, read on!
PURA VIDA
Good Life, loosely translated. But Pura Vida meant more. Pura Vida, for all intents and purposes, was the national philosophy. One heard it on every corner, every day. When a waiter wanted to know if your eggs were ok, when a cabby thanked you for a tip, or when two friends met. But what did it mean, exactly?
From the fruit stand radio, Enrique Hernandez and his All-Stars played "Mambo For Maniacs." Stepping outside the fabulous Apartamentos Ferso you would note, everything moving according to that mambo, a grand plan conceived by a lunatic. That was Pura Vida.
Cup of tea, late night greasy spoon. Fifteen children pushed inside by their mothers, selling chewing gum, refrigerator magnets, bum lighters. This was Pura Vida.
It's what made a meal in a greasy spoon in San José more valuable in life terms than a greasy spoon in Chicago. You could lose yourself in these worlds. Not understanding anyone, not being understood. Vanishing to salsa along Avenida 1.
Cut flowers in my bedroom, a three-foot palm tree soaking it up in my sun room. I would water them regularly. Weekly I'd go to the flower market to find exotic blooms. This was Pura Vida, a revelation. Because the only thing growing in my $325 a month sub-basement Aurora apartment was a Marine-force cockroach wave. I came to know the number of days it would take my azucenas to bloom. The difference between Upright Heliconia and Bird of Paradise. Ideal conditions for maracas and ginger. Pomas, yerbera, cala, helecho.gotta be Pura Vida!
You could find Pura Vida in statistics. Costa Rica was 50,895 square miles, 119 kilometers separating Caribbean Sea from Pacific Ocean. I could eat a tortilla breakfast at sunrise on the Caribbean, then drive six hours west for lunch of red snapper al ajo overlooking sunset along the Pacific rim.
San José population, 1.3 million. Heart of the Mesete Central, surrounded by volcanoes and mountains, part of the Andean-Sierra Madre chain running the length of the Americas. Mean temperature 27C/82F. Low 60s brought cries of "Que frio!" And some
Pura Vida for Chicagoans: Record low, 49 degrees. It had never snowed in San José!
Movies? In no Chi-town multiplex would I be caught dead holding a ticket for David
E.
E.
E.
Kelly's Lake Placid (renamed El Cocodrilo.) I'd sooner be shot at dawn without blindfold than be forced to witness Jean Claude Van Damme's The Legionnaire. Welcome to the Central American movie experience!
In glorious Technicolor, all the movies you ditched back home. Eagerly anticipated current releases like The Corrupter and Universal Soldier vied for attention with such rerun classics as The Glimmer Man and Maximum Risk.Imagine the dilemma, having to make the unbearable choice between First Wives Club, Flipper or Jack The Bear. Que verguenza! Being caught by a friend at the 7 o.clock show of First Wives Club. Why the hell would a sane person pay for these movies? Time and tide, budget or exhaustion? Mostly, wasn't anything else to do!
A few downtown theaters were ancient, seating upwards of a thousand people. Reminiscent of shuttered Chicago vaudeville houses like the Uptown, strict economics did not dictate survival. Twenty people paid in a house of 1,000? No problema! Here, it wasn.t maximum utilization of square-foot profit potential, but in under-development that the human was forced to the surface. Flying in the face of free market economics, such was the stuff of Pura Vida. But this was confusing! No counter-productive vagaries! Specifics!
Where and what was Pura Vida?
How about in nature? How about a country the size of West Virginia, filled with magnificent beaches and endless sun? Or twenty-two active volcanoes? Or cloud forests, or leatherback turtles coming ashore to nest, or sport fishing unmatched in the world?
Buses to these Pacific beaches cost $2.50 for a five-hour trip.I could smoke onboard and though I don't partake of that vice, it was allowed, just in case I felt the urge to light up a Cuban Robusto which were, likewise, banned in the U. S. of A.
The seafood here was similar to seafood back home, though eighty cents for sopa de mariscos might be hard to match. I.m sure some chowder house in Frisco could do so. Afterwards laze under a palm tree and dream, or listen to rumba or meringue played live at a dozen clubs. But there were plenty of palm trees and Latino clubs in the country of my birth. Clearly this couldn.t be Pura Vida. Nothing truly, objectively special about any of this.
Narrow it down! Definition! Pura Vida was:
Cha Cha music from that red ice cream van.
Racing three year-old in Parque Central, the eternal pigeon chase.
Morning sun, afternoon rain, day after day, clockwork of the Gods.
Pollution on Josefino shoulders, black stardust from Guardian angels.
Panhandlers calling out to me, "Macho!" instead of "Big Guy!"
Singing to Madonna, for Christ.s sake, Madonna! "Dada-da-da-da-dada-da, Beautiful Stranger!"
The Tico diet. Fruit, chicken, beans. No frills. No chichi East Village fare. Gallo pinto over fennel-infused lamb shanks.
The Pauly Vegas diet. Sugar and sex.
White chocolate Choco-Keks, McDonald.s vanilla conos, and caramel flutes! The more you ate, miraculously, the more weight you lost! Fruit markets all over the city, so cheap even the shoeless were well-fed. A king's ransom of tomatoes, mangos dropped in gutters, left to stray dogs likewise well-fed and thriving.
A health care system where an uninsured person walked into an emergency room, signed minimum paperwork, waited no more than fifteen minutes to be examined, was treated by a qualified doctor, received medication and exited within the hour for less than fifty bucks. Where qualified doctors were found at drugstores, over-the-counter access to necessary drugs cutting out red tape and profiting pharmaceutical middlemen.
A crowd looking up outside my breakfast joint. The spectacle? Three men all of eight stories high, washing windows. Finishing and descending, they were greeted with applause. These Ticos, these good people, with a curiosity for all things.
The Tico tongue. The gift and joy of non-communication. When from tourist mouths came English bland and boring, cocoa butter-skinned Ticas made talk of buying toilet paper sound like debates on the French poets.
Dave The Dude, infamous English DJ on 107.5, waking me at 8 a.m. with
the station's bright mechanical voice, "And now, the Cultural Calendar!"
Dave the Dude hung-over, barely able to speak the words, .Well, not very much happening actually.. Two lousy movies mentioned, he hit the mechanical voice again. "And that's today's Cultural Calendar!"
Spider, former famous Heavy Metal guitarist. Came down for a week and never left. Drunken author of such truisms as, "Costa Ricans eat too much chicken!"
Grab hold of a bull, you get the horns! Or the classic, "I ain't bitin', I'm just barkin'!"
American pensionados on $1,000 a month Social Security ducking the retirement home grave, settled here and doing "Just fine, Jack!" Endless Dick The Banker stories. Pinky's Boulevard Club in Detroit which Dick won in a craps game in '56. Scandal at the high-class Rooster Club, where the Andrews Sisters played. Dick.s pal with a PhD in Economics, driving a cab in Chicago, "not wanting to get lost in the complexities of society."Another pal, "hornier than a two-peckered billy goat," setting himself up as a bogus porno-movie producer, bangin. .em two at a time in Detroit airport hotels. These and other tales told in a single-hour session 1:13 a.m. above the all-night hamburguesa palace jamming to Super Radio, Discos Greatest Hits: 1977.
Disappearing.for Costa Rica, if nothing else, is the place to disappear.
Corner of Nada and Nadie, up a decimated stairway into purple massage parlor neon. Discovering a lady friend forced to work her tenth hour on a Sunday with a stomach so bad she had vomited the day away. Gave her twenty bucks, kissed her cheek and walked off, expecting nothing more. She, thinking me from some strange planet, with a grateful expression worth more than any penetration or fleeting touch.
Mortal moments, goose bump stuff. Bands of strumming mariachi spilled out into Saturday night as a red fire truck leads a torchlight procession up Avenida Segunda, followed by brass marching band and a dozen ke-blanging fire engines, firemen like statues held burning torches as they rolled by, the spectacle stopping the mariachis, who stood and applauded.
La Esmeralda! Country's greatest mariachi bar. Dozens of spaghetti-Western cowboys hustling three songs/thirty bucks. Botero bellies bursting from outfits out of The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly.
There! There was the all-encompassing image!
Pura Vida was: La Esmeralda, 11:04p.m., Julie Ocean and I walking in, and it began. A button burst, through a guacomoli-stained vest a belly poured, the guitar player belting out "Cumpleanos Feliz!" His crew: two trumpets, two acoustic guitars, finished to hoots from dapper locals at thirty white-linened tables. The boys in black tuxes: three violins, accordion, balladeer came out jazzy, a snappy Mexican ditty. Julie and I downing tequila as a Tica grandma was crooned to and danced with striking, black-haired balladeer.
There, bored trumpeter holding Pilsen with one hand, blowing miraculous and in-time with the other.
There, greasy waxedmustached Pavarotti in tux hustling business cards.
There, Accordion Pedro, face etched on no Warner Brothers lot, each line a testament to life's illusion and thirtythree years of dime-a-dance service to the mariachi Gods. Now came seven powder blue cowboys: two trumpets, two guitars, violin, accordion, balladeer, singing "Besame, Besame Mucho."
A bottle broke, whoops and catcalls, ambitious cowboys hard-sold, passed out cards as the less ambitious played chess, chewed chorizo, laughed with camalleros flying by drink trays held high in green neon. Five cowboys gold buckled-and-braided in a fifteen year-old Toyota ripped into Cuban salsa as a fry pan caught fire sending cooks in panic fleeing the kitchen but the music did not stop the music did not stop, reverberating from arcing sixty-foot ceiling launches and tower-like cathedral pipes, like Lourdes, Cologne, St. Peters. Julie Ocean and I out from the chapel/madhouse 2:12 a.m, singing on rainy Josefino cobblestones. Viva!
Viva, La Esmeralda!
PAULY VEGAS
