The Poetry Reading – Treacle, Bad Bunny, And Latino Housepainters

‘I paint houses, says the Robert Di Niro character in the Martin Scorsese movie, ‘The Irishman’, a euphemism for being a hit man; and Linda Chavez Porter, the poet, chose that ironic beginning for ‘Hollow Men, A Reprise’ her featured work.  Latinos, her group, were indeed housepainters, leaf-blowers, and lawn-mowers and she, a poet of tongue-in-cheek positivism and ethnic solidarity wanted to praise Caesar, not bury him.

Linda was not a poet in the published, recognized sense; but an amateur versifier that Vicki Chalmers had chosen as her political pet.  Women poets, said Vicki, especially those of color, never got their due in a white, privileged world.  Yes, there was Emily Dickenson, she noted, but she was history; and today was today, the era of the new woman, the confident woman, the champion, the spokesperson for civil rights, honor, and justice.

‘Think Guernica’, Vicki told her friends. ‘Now that’s what I’m talking about’ – a painting of powerful political import within a framework of modernism and artistic genius.  ‘Linda is of the same ilk’.

Of course she was nothing of the sort.  At best she was good at rhymes and had a way of pronouncing the cadence of her lines with a melodramatic flourish which made audiences sit up and pay attention to what was, despite Vicki’s praise, rather treacly, childish stuff.

I paint houses, said the man

A distant uncle in a faraway land

With death in his heart, and a gun in his hand

He dealt with the mob to beat the band

The group of matrons and their husbands gathered in the living room of Vicki’s suburban rambler all smiled at the irony, and familiar with Linda’s work, knew what was coming and what they had gathered together for – a screed in verse against Donald Trump, usurper of the American dream, unconscionable liar and intellectual thief, a moral brigand and fool.

Vicki was a multiculturalist, a woman with una gota of Spanish blood which gave her currency in the progressive world of inclusion and diversity.  The drop of blood had been diluted over the years, mixed with enough Palestinian bits to give her even more political credibility, but she clung to the legacy of her forbear who had demonstrated in the streets of Madrid to protest the bloody reign of Isabella and demand peasant rights for which he was guillotined in the public square, his head thrown to the dogs.

Suarez in fact was not even a footnote to Spanish history let alone a peasant hero.  Records kept in the Alhambra library cite him as ‘a man without a brain who would soon lose his head’ (un hombre sin cerebro que pronto perderia la cabeza); but Vicki never got that far – myth and popular scuttlebutt were enough for a woman whose ideas about universal social justice had been fixed since her first year at Wellesley where a young firebrand from the South Bronx had been invited to speak.  

Vicki had been taken with the Puerto Rican’s politics and, as it turned out, her powerful sexual allure and took a leave of absence from school to live with her charismatic lover in New York.

Be that as it may, Vicki was naturally drawn to the poetry of Linda Chavez and gave her every opportunity to shine, such was her defiant refusal to see the woman’s puerile verse for what it was and claim it to be the ‘new voice of Latina womanhood’.

It so happened that Bad Bunny, a Puerto Rican rapper and Latino icon was to headline the Super Bowl halftime ceremony.  The NFL had been criticized for its choice because Bad Bunny was known more for his cross-dressing and anti-ICE sentiments than for his talent.  Nevertheless, Bad Bunny went on stage, in a toned-down white suit, said ‘We are all Americans’ or some compromising nod to white people, and the show went on.

Vicki loved him for all his Latino looks, salsa, an unashamed piragua, a fancy, zoot-suited icon and hero of immigrants.  This is what white America needed – a jolt, a shot in the arm, a wakeup call heralding the arrival of diversity.  In a few short decades white people would be in the minority and in a few more wiped from the face of the earth.

All this because of a Spanish man without a brain, a South Bronx Puerto Rican lover, and some flimsy indoctrination by The Young Progressives at Wellesley but that’s what the whole diversity thing has amounted to in the first place, so Vicki was just one of those who fell in line. 

‘I am a proud Latina’, she said to the group at her poetry reading, and went on to give her by then familiar disquisition on the native beauty of the Latin woman, body and soul.  She gave Chavez, the poet, a warm embrace and sat down as she began to read.

‘We must do this again’, said one guest about to leave after the empanadas and pupusas; but as soon as she got out the door, turned to her husband and said, ‘I’m glad that’s over’, a wasted evening if there ever was one, subjected to irrelevance – and bad irrelevance at that – and the only recompense soggy Mexican food.

Vicki beamed as she embraced each one of her departing guests.  As far as she was concerned, the event had been a smashing success, one of her best; and she was indeed planning the next in what would become a series. 

She didn’t want to clean up, rearrange the furniture, or even turn off the lights, so ebullient did she feel about the evening.  She wanted to remember it as it was, a happy, engaging, fulfilling time; so she went to bed tired but happy, impatient to start the next day.

There was to be no series as Vicki had hoped.  The awful, brutally stupid poetry of the evening had sealed her fate.  Her friends who had always been loyal to her, patient beyond expectation with her growing reflexive progressivism and airy-fairy political cheeriness, had had enough.  There were limits after all.  

At their age, a chaise lounge in Tampa was more their style regardless of Donald Trump and so while Vicki was still whirling like a Turkish dervish, let their rooms be cleaned by Salvadoran maids, and be done with it.