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When I got to the hospital that morning, I found my mother mopping floors. My old man had died the day before and left an outstanding bill for her to deal with. They'd had her working through the night. I settled the debt with an advance the paper had given me. I told her I was sorry, and I was. Her face was swollen and red, but she wasn't crying anymore. She introduced me to a tired, sad-looking black woman. "This is Carmela," she said. "Your father's friend. Carmela was mopping with me." My mother looked me in the eye, as if I were supposed to interpret that. I did. I knew exactly who the woman was.
"Oscarcito? I haven't seen you since you were this big," Carmela said, touching the middle of her thigh. She reached for my hand, and I gave it to her reluctantly. Something in that comment bothered me, confused me. When had I ever seen her? I couldn't believe that she was standing there in front of me.
At the velorio, I picked out my half brothers. I counted three. For twelve years I had insulated myself from my old man's other life—since he left us, right after my fourteenth birthday. Carmela had been his lover, then his common-law wife. Petite, cocoa-colored, with blue-green eyes, she was prettier than I had imagined. She wore a simple black dress, nicer than my mother's. We didn't say much, but she smiled at me, glassy-eyed, as she and my mother took turns crying and consoling each other. No one had foreseen the illness that brought my father down.
Carmela's sons were my brothers, that much was clear. There was an air of Don Hugo in all of us: the close-set eyes, the long arms and short legs. They were a few years younger than me, the oldest maybe seventeen, the youngest about eleven. I wondered whether I should approach them, knew, in fact, that as the oldest I should. I didn't. Finally, at the insistence of our mothers, we shook hands. "Oh, the reporter," the oldest one said. He had my old man's smile. I tried to project some kind of authority over them—based on age, I guess, or the fact that they were black, or that I was the real son—but I don't think it worked. My heart wasn't in it. They touched my mother, with those light, careless touches that speak of a certain intimacy, as if she were a beloved aunt, not the supplanted wife. Even she belonged to them now. Being the firstborn of the real marriage meant nothing at all; these people were, in the end, Don Hugo's true family.
At the paper the next day, I didn't mention my father's death to anyone but the obituary guy, whom I asked to run a notice for me, as a favor to my mother. "Is he a relative?" he asked, his voice noncommittal.
"Friend of the family. Help me out, will you?" I handed him a scrap of paper:
**{: .break one} ** Hugo Uribe Banegas, native of Cerro de Pasco, passed into eternal life this past February 2nd at the Dos de Mayo Hospital in Lima. A good friend and husband, he is survived by Doña Marisol Lara de Uribe. May he rest in peace. **
I left myself and my brothers out of it. Carmela, too. They could run their own obituary if they wanted, if they could afford it.
In Lima, those who die in phantasmagoric fashion, violently, spectacularly, are celebrated in the fifty-cent papers beneath appropriately gory headlines: "driver gets melon burst" or "narco shootout, bystander eats lead." I don't work at that kind of newspaper, but if I did I would write those headlines, too. Like my father, I never refuse work. I've covered drug busts, homicides, fires at discos and markets, traffic accidents, bombs in shopping centers. I've profiled corrupt politicians, has-been soccer players, artists who hate the world. But I've never covered the unexpected death of a middle-aged construction worker in a public hospital. Mourned by his wife. His child. His other wife. His other children.
My father's dying was not news. I knew this, and there was no reason for it to be surprising or troubling. It wasn't, in fact. At the office, I typed my articles and was not bothered by his passing. But that afternoon Villacorta sent me out to do research on clowns, for a Sunday feature on street performers that he'd assigned me a few weeks earlier. It may have been the mood I was in, but the idea of it made me sad: clowns with their absurd and artless smiles, their shabby, outlandish clothes. I'd walked only a few blocks when I felt, inexplicably, assaulted by loss. In the insistent noise of the streets, in the cackling voice of a d.j. on the radio, in the glare of the summer sun, it was as if Lima were mocking me, ignoring me, thrusting its indifference at me. A heavy woman sold wigs from a wooden cart. A tired clown rested on the curb, a cigarette between his lips, and asked me for a light. I didn't have the heart to interview him. The sun seemed to pass straight through me. My tiny family had been dissolved into another grouping, one in which I had no part.
In Lima, my father had settled on construction. He built offices, remodelled houses. He was good with a hammer, could paint and spackle, put up a wall in four hours. He was a plumber and a locksmith. A carpenter and a welder. When offered a job, he always answered in the same way. "I've done it many times," he'd reassure a contractor, while examining a tool he'd never seen before in his life. As a child, I admired him and his hard work. Progress was something you could measure in our neighborhood: how fast the second floor of your house went up, how quickly you acquired the accoutrements of middle-class life. During the week, he worked on other people's houses; on weekends, he worked on ours. Hard work paid off. We inaugurated a new stereo with a Hector Lavoe tape. We watched the '85 Copa América on a fancy color television.
It was not all that transparent, of course. My father was vivo, quick to understand the essential truth of Lima: if there is money to be made, it must be bled from these concrete city blocks. Some win and some lose, and there are ways to tilt the odds. He was charming, and he did good work, but he was always, always looking out for himself.
He'd been too restless to survive back home. Pasco, where he and my mother and I were born, is, oddly, neither city nor country. It is isolated and poor, high on an Andean puna, but in a very specific way it is urban: its concept of time is mechanized, and no one is spared by capitalism's ticking clock. A mining town, Pasco is not pastoral or agricultural. Men descend into the earth for ten-hour shifts. Their schedule is monotonous, uniform. They emerge—in the morning, the afternoon, or the evening—and start drinking. The work the men do is brutal and dangerous, and in time their life aboveground begins to resemble life below: they take chances, they drink, they cough and expel a tarry black mucus. The color of money, they call it, and buy another round of drinks.
My old man wasn't suited to those rituals. Instead, he found work driving trucks to the coast and into the city. He was twenty-nine when he married my mother, nearly a decade older than his young wife. He'd spent most of his twenties working in the city, coming back only once every three or four months. Somehow a romance had blossomed on those visits home. By the time they married, they'd been a couple for five years already, most of that time spent apart. I was born six months after the wedding. My father went on coming and going for years, making a home for himself in Lima, in the district of San Juan de Lurigancho. When my mother could no longer tolerate being left alone, he brought us there, too.
That was, I think, the only good thing he did for us. Or for me. When I remember Pasco, that cold high plain, its thin air and sinking houses, I'm grateful to be here. I grew up in Lima. I went to university here and landed a respectable job. There is no future in Pasco. Kids don't study and, anyway, are taught almost nothing. They inhale glue from brown paper bags or get drunk in the weak morning light before school.
I was eight when we moved. My father was a stranger, it seemed, even to my mother. They held hands on the bus to Lima, and I slept in her lap, even though I was too old for that. It was early January; we left Pasco iced over, the syncopated drumming of hail falling on its metal roofs. We watched the speckled orange lights fade behind us, and when I woke up it was dawn and we were pulling into the station in Lima. "There are bad people here," my old man warned us. "Be mosca, Chino. You're an hombrecito now. You have to take care of your mother."
I'd been to the city before, two years earlier, though I scarcely remembered it. My father had come home to Pasco one day and carried me off for three weeks. He'd led me through the city, pointing out the important buildings; he'd shown me the movement of the streets. I remember my mother telling me that at age six I was already more travelled than she was. Now she held my hand as the world swirled around us, and I watched my old man push his way through a thicket of men at the open door of the bus's baggage hold. They elbowed and pushed one another, the crowd swelling this way and that, and my father, who was not tall or particularly strong, disappeared into the center of it. My mother and I waited. I stared down a mustachioed man who was circling us, his greedy eyes tugging at the red woollen bag my mother had wedged between us. Then there was yelling: one man pushed another, accusing him of trying to steal his package. The accuser had a foot planted firmly on top of his box. It was taped, a name and address printed on one side.
"Oye, compadre, que chucha quieres con mis cosas?"
"Ah? Perdón, tío, my mistake."
The second man was my father. It was an accident, he protested. Packages look alike. My father's long arms were bent, palms up, a charmless shrug. But the older man was furious, his face red and his fists clenched. "No mierda, aquí no hay errores. Thief!" The other men pulled them apart; in the blur of it, my father grinned at me, and I realized that we'd brought only bags, no boxes.
In front of the Congress, along Avenida Abancay, a protest had spilled off the sidewalk, and traffic was stalled for five city blocks. The protesters were construction workers or telephone workers or obstetricians. Social movements, like all predators, sense weakness: the President was teetering; half his Cabinet had resigned. But on the street it still looked like Lima, beautiful, disgraced Lima, unhappy and impervious to change. I'd been to a press conference in the suburbs and was on a bus headed back to the city. The air was sticky and as thick as soup. A svelte policewoman in a beige uniform directed cars east, through the miniature streets of Barrios Altos, where cramped quintas fell in on each other, where kids laced up their cheap sneakers, scanning the slow-moving traffic for an opportunity. The day before, there had been robberies, entire busloads shaken down at a red light, and we were all tense, bags clutched tightly against our chests. It was the first week of carnival, and everyone from age five to fifteen (which, in Barrios Altos, is nearly everyone) was in the streets with water balloons, menacing, eager. The dilemma we faced was which way to suffer.
"Oye, chato. Close the window."
"Estás loco. It's too hot."
The tug-of-war began: between those who were willing to accept the risk of theft or pranks in order to counter the oppressive heat, and those who were not. The driver strained against his homemade seat belt. Windows opened and closed, pulled and pushed from all sides, and on the sidewalks youths salivated, hands in buckets, kneading water balloons as if they were their best friend's girlfriend's tits. Then it came from everywhere at once: from the narrows between crumbling buildings, and from the roofs as well, kids tossing overhand and underhand, unloading balloons two at a time. Water splashed through the cracked windows. The sidewalks glistened, littered with the exploded insides of red and green and white balloons. The primary target, I soon realized, was not our bus, or any bus, or, as is often the case, a young woman in a white shirt. Instead, on the sidewalk, dodging water balloons, there was a clown.
He was a vender, a travelling salesman, a poor working clown. He'd stepped off a bus and found himself in the crosshairs of a hundred children. He was struggling to get his bearings. He tucked his chin into his chest so that his multi-colored wig bore the brunt of the attack, strands of pink and red sagging beneath the soaking. He had nowhere to go: a step forward, a step back, a step to the wall, a step to the curb—he danced clumsily in his big clown shoes, the balloons raining down on him. There was laughter on our bus, laughter that built community; passengers emerged from their private meditations to point and laugh and ridicule. Then the ticket collector, moved by pity, opened the door and pulled the clown in.
We fell silent. The clown dripped on the corrugated-metal floor of the bus, his white face paint running, crinkled pink hairs sticking to his cheeks. He made me want to cry, this poor clown, this pathetic specimen of Limeño. Hermano! Causa! The bus didn't move, and then it did. The volley of balloons receded. And, in the uncomfortable silence, dishevelled though he was, the clown went to work. He reached into an inside pocket and took out a large bag of mints. Tiny drops of water slid off the bag. "Señores y Señoras, Damas y Caballeros," he proclaimed. "I'm here today to offer you a new product, a product you may never have seen before. Developed with the newest and most refined technology in European mint processing. . . ."
We could hear the protest still, on the west side of the congressional building. Wooden spoons against pots, a dull metallic complaint, rhythmless, the thick voice of the people and their unfocussed rage. The clown, with his plastic clown voice, tried to sell us mints, his smile a force of will.
The newsroom swarmed with activity; a Presidential pronouncement on the economy had set everyone to work. There were rumors: some Cabinet members had fled. I didn't pay much attention. I left the office early and went to San Juan to see my mother. I took a copy of the paper to show her the obituary, a peace offering of sorts.
San Juan, my old street: the same crooked tree casting thin shadows in the vanishing light of dusk. I'd been living downtown for six years, but I recognized some faces. Don Segundo, from the restaurant, who had fed me for free a hundred times when we were short. Señora Nelida, from the corner, who would never give our ball back if it landed on her roof. Our old neighbor Elisa was there, too, sitting, as she always did, on a wooden stool in front of her store. One of its legs was shorter than the others. She'd repaired it with a phone book, wedged between the ground and the offending leg.
"Vecina," I said.
We spoke for a minute, the exchange easy and familiar. What I was doing. My work at the paper. How proud they were of me in the neighborhood when they saw my name in print. I knew this last part wasn't true, at least not among the people my age. I'd seen how my old friends looked at me: aware, perhaps, that I had once existed as a part of their world, but dismissive of every claim I had of belonging there still. We were disappearing fragments of one another's history, fading tracers against a clear night sky.
Finally, Elisa said, "Your mother's not home, Chino."
The streetlights had come on, and I noticed with some surprise that they crawled up the mountainside now. The neighborhood was still growing. New people arrived every day, as we once had, with bags and boxes and hopes, to construct a life in the city. We'd been lucky. Our new house had been small but well built. Everyone had welcomed us. Our street was overflowing with children, and within a week I'd forgotten about Pasco, about the friends I'd left there. My mother found work as a maid in San Borja, four days a week at the Azcárates', a friendly couple with a son my age. Her employers were generous, kind, and understanding to a fault, especially after Don Hugo left us. They lent us money, and helped pay for my studies when my old man abandoned that responsibility as well. They never kept my mother late—so where was she?
Elisa looked at me somewhat sheepishly. "You know, Chino, she's been staying with la negra. With Carmela's family, in La Victoria."
"How long?"
"Since your father got sick, Chino."
Elisa motioned for me not to leave while she sold a kilo of sugar to an elderly woman in a light-green dress. I'd rolled the newspaper with the obituary into a tight baton. Now I tapped it against my thigh. I considered Elisa's news, what it meant. The scope of my mother's weakness, her astounding lack of pride. How could the arrangement work on either side, especially now, with the man who connected the two women dead? Carmela ran a dress shop, an enterprise she'd begun with my father's investment. With my money, probably, which should have been spent on my books, on my schooling. The business had succeeded, but was it enough, I wondered, to support the grief of two widows and three children—two of whom, at least, were still in school?
Elisa turned to me again as her customer shuffled down the street.
"Does she come here, then? Ever?" I asked.
"Your mother? Sometimes. I saw her a few days ago. I don't ask so much, you know. She's embarrassed. She's afraid of what you'll think."
"She knows exactly what I think."
Elisa sighed. "She didn't want you to know."
"Then you shouldn't have told me."
Elisa leaned back against the metal gate in front of the store. "Oscar."
"I'm sorry, vecina." I looked down at my feet like a misbehaving child, and stamped out the prints of my sneakers in the dusty earth. "Anyway, thank you."
"I'll tell her you came by when I see her. Or, you know, Chino, if you want you could—"
"Thank you, vecina."
It was late. From my old street, I used to cut across the field behind the market at any hour, fearlessly, but now it seemed an unnecessary hazard. The addicts would be out. In the firelight flicker of their ritual, I might have recognized an old friend, ashen, lost. I walked the long way out to the avenue.
I tried to picture my mother in her new home, sleeping in a guest bed or on a cot in the living room that she put away each morning. She and Carmela, sharing stories and tears, forgiving the old man in a nostalgic widows' duet. What could they have in common? Carmela was Limeña, a businesswoman; she knew how the city worked. My mother had been just a girl when she met my old man, barely fifteen. In Lima, he had learned to dance salsa. To drink and smoke, to fight, fuck, and steal. My mother had learned none of this. She had waited for Hugo to come home and propose. Even now, she still had her mountain accent. For years she had known only one bus line—"the big green bus," she called it—that took her to the Azcárates' home. What could Carmela and my mother share besides a battleground? My mother had capitulated. It gave me vertigo: it was the kind of humiliation only a life like hers could prepare you for.
On Saturdays, when we first moved to the city, she would take me to the Azcárates' house with her. We rode that big green bus, my mother tense, watching the streets pass in gray monotony, afraid of missing her stop. As a child and not an employee, I was able to cross certain lines. The Azcárates were permissive with me, and I never felt out of place in their home. I'd lay out my books on the table in the garden and do my homework, humming songs to myself. Sometimes their son, Sebastián, and I would wage war, setting up epic battles with swarms of plastic soldiers.
My mother liked everything about being in that house. She liked the order of it. She liked the plush of the golden-brown carpet. She even liked the books, though she couldn't read them, for the progress they represented. If I was bothering her in the kitchen, she always shooed me away: "Go grab a book, Chino. I'm busy right now."
I was sitting with her in the kitchen one day when I asked her why we had moved. In the comfort of that kitchen, I knew that this was better than that, but, the way my mother spoke of Pasco sometimes, one might picture a wide fertile valley, instead of the poor and violent town it really was. Lima frightened her. She felt safe in only two places: our house and the Azcárates' house.
"We had to move, Chino. Your father was here." She was baking a cake and she stirred the mix with a spatula. "Do you miss Pasco?"
I didn't have to think about it. "No," I said. "Do you miss it, Ma?"
"Of course," she said.
Her face fell. "Your grandparents are there! I grew up there! Chino, how can you ask such a thing?"
"I don't know," I said, because I didn't. She was a mystery to me, romanticizing the life we'd left behind. "It's cold there."
"If you lived away from me, wouldn't you miss me?" she asked.
"Of course, Ma."
"That's how I feel."
"Papi doesn't miss Pasco."
She smiled. It was true, of course. Lima was his back yard, the place where he could become what he'd always imagined himself to be. "He," she said finally, "is different. And you, Chino," she added, "you're just like your father."
I sat on the Jirón, watching Lima pass by. A pedestrian mall of roast-chicken joints and tattoo parlors, of stolen watches and burned CDs. Colonial buildings plastered over with billboards and advertisements. A din of conversations and transactions: dollars for sale; slot machines; English tapes announcing, "Mano"—pause, pause—"Hand." Blind musicians singing songs. Pickpockets scoping tourists. The city inhaling. A cop took a bribe in the privacy of a recessed doorway. A nun tried to pin a ribbon on me, for a donation. I dodged her with my most polite smile. Then I felt, like an electric current, the street convey a message. From the Plaza San Martín, the whole world appeared to be running toward me, and past me, toward the Plaza Mayor. Metal gates closed with clangs and crashes all along the Jirón. Businesses were shuttered with customers inside. The cop disappeared. I imagined the worst: a drunken mob of soccer fans wrecking and looting, raping and robbing. I ran to the end of the block and watched the people scatter. Then the Jirón was empty, and it was one of the strangest things I'd ever seen.
Fifteen shoeshine boys.
The children walked in rows of three, dressed in secondhand clothes, sneakers worn at the heels, donated T-shirts with American logos. Some were so young that they were dwarfed by their kits. One dragged his wooden box behind him, unconcerned as it bumped and bounced along the cobblestones. All were skinny, fragile, and smiling. As they marched toward me, they were led by a clown on stilts, twice their height, dancing elegantly around them in looping figure eights, arms extended like the flapping wings of a bird.
I watched in amazement as the protest strode past me, the children whispering their demands, the panic subsiding. Had it been a drill? A joke of some sort? Store owners and customers emerged from their bunkers, relieved and confused. Lima was playing tricks again.
I was twelve when I learned that my old man had another angle. The scheme went like this: You put in a new bathroom, or tile a kitchen, or add a third floor to a house in Surco or La Molina. You are a model worker, always polite and respectful. You don't play your music too loud. You wipe your feet and clean up after yourself. All the while, you do your real work with your eyes. Television, check. Stereo, check. Computer, check. Jewelry, check. Anything electric can be sold—kitchen appliances, even wall clocks. Nice clothes, too, especially women's. You scout for windows without locks, flimsy doors, back entrances. You keep track of schedules: When the husband is at work, when the wife is at the salon. When the kids come home from school. When the maid is there alone.
My father and his crew were smart. They could wait a few months or as long as a year. Sometimes the neighborhood security guard was in on it, too; for a small fee, he'd tell them when a family was out of town. Other times, the maid got the worst of it: the fright, and often the blame.
I remember one evening at our house. They were planning, or, perhaps, celebrating. There were six of them, and I knew some so well that I called them tío. They came around a lot, to drink with my old man, to play soccer on Sundays. And they sat close together, talking in low voices, bubbling now and then into laughter. I was called to bring more beer from the fridge. I passed a cold bottle to my father, who took it without looking, intent on what his partner, Felipe, was saying. I listened, too. "I always try to smack the maid real good," Felipe said proudly. "And I try to break something—just so the family doesn't think she was in on it." Everyone cheered this perverse generosity. My father, too. Standing at the edge of the circle of men, I thought of my own mother falling to the floor.
Villacorta was asking for his article. I was avoiding him. The government had not fallen, and the protests continued. A group of unemployed textile workers burned tires and looted in El Agustino. There was talk of the President not returning from his next state trip. I was counting on the story to snowball, to crowd my clown feature out of the news section the following Sunday. An extra week would help.
I worked and slept and worked, and thought as little as possible about my old man, my mother, Carmela. I thought about clowns. They had become, to my surprise, a kind of refuge. Once I'd started looking for them, I found them everywhere. They organized the city for me: buses, street corners, plazas. They suited my mood. Appropriating the absurd, embracing shame, they transformed it. Laugh at me. Humiliate me. And, when you do, I've won. Lima was, in fact and in spirit, a city of clowns.
The February heat smothered the city, even after dark, and in the evenings I rarely made it farther than the bar downstairs. The overhead fans whirled, stirring the warmth. I listened to the hum of a dozen separate conversations, to the clink of glasses, to cheerful applause in the back room. It made me feel less alone.
One night, a clown stood at the counter next to me. I recognized him. He worked mornings in front of San Francisco, for the children who went there on school trips. I knew the red-and-orange plaid of his suit. Usually he had a partner, but he was alone now, tired, halfway out of costume, headed for home. Like me, he probably wanted a drink to help him sleep. I should have let him go on his way, but before I realized it I'd blurted out, "You're a clown."
He turned, puzzled, and looked me in the eye. "You asking me or telling me, causa?"
"Asking, friend."
"And who the fuck are you?" His frown was very unclownlike, the kind of look that would frighten a child. There was white greasepaint ground into the wrinkles at the edges of his mouth.
"Oscar Uribe," I said. "I write for El Clarín."
"The newspaper?" He turned away, back to the business of ordering a drink. I pulled out two chairs at a table by the bar and moved my bottle of red wine.
"Maestro!" I called to the waiter. "Another glass, please!" The waiter acknowledged me with a wave. I looked back at the clown, motioning to the empty chair. He shrugged and sat down.
His name was Tonio, he said, and he didn't have all night.
But I kept the wine coming. I found myself telling him about my mother, about my old man. About Pasco and San Juan. He listened and drank. Then he told me about his home town, in the north, about arriving in Lima penniless. He said that he'd lived under the Santa Rosa Bridge for a time. And clowning? "It's work, brother. Better than some, worse than others," he said. "I'm not good at much else. It's either this or stealing."
"Amen," I said.
He told me how good it felt to be someone else for a living, to be out in the streets on a clear day. He said that the children had sweet faces and it touched him to see them happy. He complained about having to compete with every unemployed nobody selling candy on the buses.
"Does it pay the bills?"
"I don't need much," he said, nodding. "No wife. No kids."
"How did you settle on this line of work?"
He smiled then, so unexpectedly that I thought he'd misunderstood me. It was a wonderful smile, a real clown smile. With his thumb, he rubbed at the paint still hiding in the creases of his face. "No, causa," he said, shaking his head. "It's like this: You wake up one morning, and boom! You're a clown."
Señor Ingeniero Hubert Azcárate opened the door. He shook my father's hand, patted me on the head, and waved us both in. I wiped my feet three times, back and forth against the thick doormat. I'd been there many more times than my father had. He was watching my every move. There were three stairs, and at the bottom of the landing the room opened up into a wide, airy space full of light. An L-shaped sofa and a leather armchair were positioned around a wooden coffee table. Built-in shelves along the walls held hundreds of books. The windows opened onto a garden terrace with trees and grass and flowers sprouting in warm colors.
"Mari!" Señor Azcárate called out. "Your husband is here, with Chino!"
My mother appeared from the kitchen, a little shocked to see us. Her maid's uniform was a pristine white. She kissed us both, and then asked, concerned, "What are you doing here?"
Señor Azcárate had already made his way to his comfortable leather chair, and he sat now, observing us with an air of patrician benevolence. "Oh, don't worry, Mari," he said. "Your husband only wanted to speak with me. It's no problem at all."
"Go on back to the kitchen," my father said. "We'll come say goodbye before we leave."
My father sat down. He began by recounting the reasons that we were grateful to Señor and the Azcárate family. The generosity, the solidarity, the understanding. "Things haven't always been easy, but I tell Mari, I tell her every day, God was smiling on us the day she got this job."
I had never heard my father invoke God for any reason other than to explain the weather.
Señor Azcárate nodded, yes, yes, yes, savoring my father's gratitude. He was a thin man whose pale-blue eyes had become even more prominent as his hair receded. He often squinted when he spoke, as if we were drifting away and he might lose sight of us. "Please, please, Hugo. Go on."
"Señor Ingeniero, at Chino's new school," my father continued, "everyone will have money." I was about to start at a private school in San Isidro, where the Azcárates had arranged a scholarship.
"Are you worried about the tuition?" Señor Azcárate asked. "I explained to Mari that everything is covered except the uniforms."
"No, no, it's not that." My old man searched for the right words. "You know, Señor Ingeniero, I'm a builder. I work almost every day—I should say, every day that I can." He put his arm around me. "We're so proud of Chino. I always knew that he was a smart one. But, you know, we struggle to pay for this, to pay for that. There isn't always work, that's the thing. . . . I'm embarrassed to even ask, after all you've done for us."
"No, no, ask, Hugo, please." Señor Azcárate leaned toward my father. My father's silence was studied. "How long has Marisol worked with us?" Azcárate asked. "I'll tell you: long enough that she's family." He smiled, then turned to me, speaking as if to a child of five. "You're family, Chino, you know that? Your father, he's family, too."
I nodded, perplexed. Finally, my old man spoke, and this time he went straight to the point. "I was hoping, if it's possible, if anyone from Chino's new school would be doing work on their house . . ."
"I really couldn't say."
"No, but, if they were, could you put in a word for me? For my business?"
It was Don Hubert Azcárate's favorite kind of favor, the kind he could fulfill. The kind that confirmed his own charity. He was a nice man, he really was. He promised that he would. My father smiled happily. "Thank Señor Azcárate, Chino," he told me. I shook the engineer's veiny hand. Then the two men embraced. "You don't know what this means to me," my old man said.
All my life, I've been Chino. In Pasco, in Lima. At home, in my neighborhood. The way some people are Chato or Cholo or Negro. I hear those two syllables and look up. There are thousands of us, of course, perhaps hundreds of thousands, here and everywhere that Spanish is spoken. No nickname could be less original. There are soccer players and singers known as Chino. One of our crooked Presidents lived and died by his moniker: chino de mierda. Still, it is my name, and always was my name. Until I started at Peruano Británico, that is. There, I was called Piraña.
Piranhas were already a phenomenon in Lima by the time I started high school. The authorities had ordered investigations and organized police sweeps. There were news reports and shocking images. A city on the brink. In packs of fifteen or twenty, they would swarm a car and swiftly, ruthlessly undress it. Hubcaps, mirrors, lights. The crawling commute held the prey in place—the owner of the car, helpless, honking his horn frantically, aware perhaps that the wisest thing was to do nothing at all. To wait for them to pass. But that was an option only for a while. More audacious crews started breaking windows, taking briefcases, cell phones, watches, sunglasses, radios. Full service, people joked darkly. A new kind of crime, sociologists called it. And an astute observer—of the kind who traffic in phrases—named them piranhas.
At morning roll call in the courtyard of my new school, my class lined up in single file. I found my place in the order of last names, Uribe, almost at the back. Ugaz in front of me. Ventosilla behind me. My uniform was neat and pressed, and I looked, from a distance, just like all the others. The teacher called us off, and one by one we marched to our new classroom. It wasn't until recess that afternoon that my classmates sought me out. "Oye, you play?" The kid held a soccer ball in his hands. He kicked it to me. I passed it back, making sure I used good form. I introduced myself as Oscar or Chino. "César," he answered. We formed a team. We grabbed a kid with glasses and put him in goal. We played. We scored and were scored on. We yelled and sweated and cursed and then, when I took the ball from a kid on the other team, he called a foul, dropped to the ground, and held his ankle, grimacing. In San Juan, I would have called him a pussy, and that would've been that. But he yelled, "Oye! Oye!" and we stopped. "That's a foul here, huevón," he said, frowning. "Where the hell are you from?"
I didn't have to respond, but I did. I could have said any place in the city, but I didn't. "San Juan de Lurigancho," I answered.
Of course, eventually they would have found out where I was from. They would have seen me walking to the Avenida Arequipa to catch the bus home. They would have known that I didn't live in La Molina or Surco. But perhaps if they hadn't learned this detail on the very first day, if they had known me better, they wouldn't have associated me with the criminal reputation of my district.
"San Juan?" he said, breaking into a cruel smile. "Ooooohh . . . Habla piraña!"
I met Tonio at eight-thirty the next morning in front of San Francisco. He was already painted and dressed. I was still shaking off sleep and a red-wine headache. He introduced me to his partner, a yellow-faced clown named Jhon.
"You're the reporter?" Jhon asked suspiciously.
"Be nice," Tonio said.
He pulled an oversized polka-dot suit from his backpack. It was white with green dots. It fit me like a garbage bag. Tonio declared it perfect. Jhon agreed. A pair of green shoes was next; I wiggled my feet into them. They were twice the length of my forearm. Then Tonio handed me a mirror and three plastic cannisters of face paint, each the size of a roll of film. "You take care of that," he said, holding out a thin brush.
I felt outside of myself; the details of the previous night's conversation were so hazy and wine-soaked that I couldn't recall exactly how I had ended up there or what commitments I had made. In the mirror, I watched myself transform. I put red circles on my cheeks. Jhon passed me a nose. It was an oversized red Ping-Pong ball cut in half and threaded by a rubber band. Finally, Tonio pulled a worn jester's hat from the bottom of his bag, the colors faded, the pointy edges falling limply in my face. It would have to do.
Walking through the city, one-third of a trio of clowns, I was surprised to find how relaxed I was, and how invisible. You'd think the world's gazes would have converged upon us, on our loud costumes and painted smiles, but most people simply ignored us, walked past without a glance; only the children smiled and pointed, sometimes waved. Jhon and Tonio chatted about soccer; I watched and listened in a daydream.
We let a few buses pass because they were too empty. "It's bad luck at the beginning of the day," Tonio explained. Finally, he nodded as a more crowded bus approached. We pushed past the ticket collector and were instantly onstage, all eyes on us. "Señores y Señoras, Damas y Caballeros!" We stood in a row, Tonio in the center, yelling over the asthmatic rattle of the engine. "I am not here asking for charity! In fact, I am a rich man! This is my bus! This is my driver! And this," Tonio bellowed, pointing to the ticket collector, hanging halfway out the door of the bus, calling the route, "this is my mascot!"
Jhon was the chorus, echoing every pronouncement Tonio made, in the stereotypical voice of a drunk lifted from a Rubén Blades song. He pretended to fall, and Tonio made sheepish apologies for his drunken partner, who had spent the night before "celebrating the purchase of a new three-story home in San Borja!"
I felt useless. I flashed my dumb clown smile and tapped my fingers against my chest. I could feel my face paint drying to an uncomfortable film, affixing an unnatural contortion to the muscles of my face. I was dazed, almost seasick, as the bus sped along the avenue. Tonio was wrapping up. "My humble servant—God bless the poor deaf-mute—will be passing by your seats now to collect your fare." He bowed low, and then nodded at me.
We weren't selling anything; this was a bold conceit that Tonio had devised to cut costs. It was our bus; I simply passed down the aisle collecting everyone's fare. "Pasajes, pasajes a la mano," I murmured, just as a ticket collector would. Some passengers, napping, barely opening their eyes, handed me a coin without thinking. Some dropped loose change in my hand; some even thanked me. Most ignored me, looking away, even men and women who had watched the act and smiled.
I collected a total of 4.20 soles. The bus stopped. "Ladies and gentlemen, good day!" Tonio shouted. We stepped off into the morning sun. The whole thing had taken five minutes.
I put a coin in the slot and dialled the number for Elisa's bodega. It was early afternoon. Tonio and Jhon sat in a café across the street, sharing a cup of tea. We were back downtown, taking a break. We'd been thrown off buses, had change tossed at us, been spat at. But we'd made money. A good day, Tonio assured me, better than usual. They seemed content.
The phone rang and rang in San Juan, and then she answered. She asked me how I was.
I looked at the busy street, the people meandering homeward or workward, lost in their own lives. "I'm at the office, vecina. I can't talk long." I asked her if she'd seen my mother.
"At the funeral, Chino. Why weren't you there?"
"I had to work. I couldn't make it. Did she say anything?"
"She misses you, Chino." I heard Elisa sigh. "She said that everything is good with Carmela. That she might sell the house."
I didn't say anything.
"Chino, are you there?"
"I'm here."
"Are you going to visit her?"
Tonio and Jhon were paying with change, haggling for a little extra hot water. They counted the money out in ten-cent coins. The waitress tried to hold back a smile. Jhon leaned over the counter and blew her a kiss. They were charming clowns. "Thank you, vecina," I said, and hung up the phone.
My new nickname both labelled me as dangerous and emasculated me. I was never scary to them. I was a joke. A nerdy kid from the ghetto. I was too skinny. Too weak. Even when I played well or ran fast, they hurled insults at me. In San Juan, we'd joked about how I would beat up these pitucos, but the reality was different. They wielded their power carelessly, sometimes unconsciously. They could cut me out with a comment or simply with silence.
"It's time for you to start working," my father announced.
It was my second year at Peruano Británico. I was almost fourteen. In more than a year, I'd never been invited to a classmate's home. Each day, I rode the bus from San Juan to San Isidro in silence.
I'd given my father's line of work a lot of thought. I'd examined it under the rule of ethics and law. It was wrong. Certainly. But when he told me it was time for me to work my mind gathered a year of scattered insults and wove them together. I savored those injuries, imagined what a delight it would be to go through one of those boys' houses, to exchange smiles and handshakes. To work there, and then to steal. I began to understand my old man, or to think I did. But I wanted to be sure.
"I want to work," I said.
"Of course you do. Every man wants to work."
"Pa, are we going to break into this house?"
He sat back. Frowned. He'd misread me. "Have people been saying things?"
I nodded.
"And what do you think about what they say?" He seemed poised to smile at the slightest hint of approval.
"I believe them."
"Well, Chino," he said, and stopped.
I wanted to take it back. To add to it: I believe what they say, but it's all right with me. I wanted to tell him that those rich fucks could complain to God if they didn't like it. That they could move to Miami and become American. That, if they wanted to call me Piraña, then they'd better be good and fucking ready when I came in and repossessed all their treasures.
He ran a finger through his hair and winked. His large black eyes were set close, his mouth was small, comically so, but his broad smile evened everything out, organized the jumble of his features. He kept his black hair meticulously combed back. At rest, he was a caricature of an Indian. In laughter, he was a mestizo Clark Gable. So he laughed and smiled and made that smile the linchpin of his personality. Now he met my gaze, his son—I believed, his only son. "Chino, we're just men who work. You and I both. Crazy things happen in the city." He snapped his fingers and laughed. He hugged me. "O.K.?"
The wife had a good eye for color. She had decorated the house herself, she told us. She walked us through the expansive suburban mansion—my father, Felipe, and me—pointing out renovations and design touches: a wall they'd knocked down, leaving only painted beams. "See how this adds space to the room? Gives it another feel?" she asked. The three of us nodded, our eyes wide and observant. There were skylights, balconies, a garden with blossoming trees, but we focussed on what could be taken away: a computer, a stereo, even a dishwasher. The husband was an executive at a bank, an old friend of Señor Azcárate's. They wanted to remodel the second floor, to add a television room, she said. It wouldn't be a lot of work, maybe three or four weeks. Some painting. New carpet. A couple of new windows and light fixtures.
I worked on Saturdays, and I saw my father more on those days than I ever had at home. During the week, he was mostly gone. His youngest son was still in diapers, and my mother must have known about Carmela by then. When he was home they argued, but I didn't know why. The construction on our own house had stalled, the second floor still open air, a thick plastic sheet tied at the corners of three walls. When they were fighting, I retreated there and watched the ridges of the hills draw lines against the sky.
The family we were working for had a son, Andrés, who was in the class above me at Peruano Británico. At his house, he ignored me. At school, he let it be known that I had crossed the line. I felt the stares, the judgment. By the time he woke up on Saturdays, I had already been working for three or four hours. His weekends, as far as I could tell, took the shape of an extended yawn. I placed tiles in the hallway. He ate cereal. I sanded down corners and measured for bookshelves. He spoke on the phone, loud enough for me to hear. "Yeah, Piraña's here. You bet I'm watching my shit, huevón." He made no attempt to hide his disdain for me. I listened to him speculate as to which girl would be the first to let him seduce her in the new room we were building. How far she would spread her legs. With a long phone cord dragging behind him, he paraded through the work area, complained of the dust, asked his mother to tell us that the sanding was hurting his ears. He put on a show of power. I bowed my head at the appropriate times and pretended not to hear.
One Saturday, when we were almost done, the entire family was getting ready for a wedding. The mother flitted about, changing her dress three times. The father came in to tell us that we'd have to leave a little early because they all had to go. We were hurrying our work along, trying to finish, when Andrés called out to his mother, "Mami, tell Piraña to stop with the hammering! I can't even think!"
He stepped out into the hallway, wearing a gray wool suit and a red tie, still unknotted. He glared at me.
"What did you call him, Andrés?" his mother said sharply, coming into the room. Her hair was styled in a hard, gelled bob. She stood in front of him, waiting for him to speak.
"Piraña," Andrés muttered.
"What?" she said, surprised, embarrassed. "Why would you call him that?" She turned to me. "Son, what's your name?"
"Oscar, Señora."
"Your mother works with the Azcárates, doesn't she?"
I felt myself turning red. "Yes, Señora."
"And what year are you in?"
"Third, Señora."
Andrés watched this exchange with practiced condescension. In his elegant suit he was transformed, ready to be photographed for Lima's society pages. He was taller than me, and more handsome, bathed at that moment in superiority, profound and harsh. I wore my work clothes, worn at the knees and splattered with paint.
"Andrés," his mother said, "this is Oscar. This young man is a student at your school. He is friends with Sebastián Azcárate. Now shake his hand and introduce yourself like a gentleman."
His eyes steeled, and his hand, too. He held it out.
"Andrés," he said.
We shook. No, you were right, I thought. Piraña concha tu madre. That's my fucking name.__ I glared at him and held his hand, perhaps a moment too long. I squeezed.
"That's enough, boys," his mother said, and they both turned to leave.
"Good afternoon, Señora," I called.
We played to passengers in Santa Anita, Villa Maria, and El Agustino. We rode through Comas, Los Olivos, and Carabayllo. Three days. Lima on display, in all her grandeur, the systems of the city becoming clear to me: her cells, her arteries, her multiple beating hearts. We collected laughs and coins until the money weighed heavy in my suit pocket. I was a secret agent. I saw six people I knew: among them, an ex-girlfriend, two old neighbors from San Juan, and a woman from the university. Even a colleague from the paper. Exactly zero recognized me. I was forgetting myself, too, patrolling the city, spying on my own life. I had never felt this way: on display, but protected from the intruding eyes of strangers and intimates.
I watched the ex-girlfriend chew the nail of her pinkie. When we were together, she'd seemed to me the type who would flower, grow into herself, become more attractive each year. But she was twenty-seven now and still not beautiful. I looked her in the eye as she handed me a coin, felt a shock when her finger grazed my open palm. She had no idea who I was.
My old man had paid off the security guard. He'd given us a time and a day. The whole family was out of town. I'd been waiting six months for this. I was a good student and they hated me. I was a good soccer player and they mocked me. I didn't understand a thing about them, or why they were the way they were.
We rode in Felipe's windowless van. They tossed me over the wall. I opened the garage and they backed the van in. The rest was easy. The television, the VCR, the computer, the stereo—each was carried out and packed carefully into the van. We moved nimbly through the dark house, carrying the wares as if they were works of art. And they were. A sleek cordless phone meant thirty soles. A blender, fifteen, if you knew where to sell it. It was so ordered and efficient, it didn't seem like stealing at all.
My father told me once that in Lima anything can be bought and sold. We were walking through the market in San Juan, past the fruit stalls, flies buzzing around the meat and fish. A woman sold clothes piled in high, disordered mounds. Fake Barcelona jerseys. Stolen car parts and bags and watches. An old man stood by his cart of hardware: hammers, pliers, and nails, bent, rusty, unmistakably used. My old man found it pathetic. "Used nails!" he cried out. "For the love of God, are we this poor?"
I did a last run through the house. We were almost done. It was my first time out, my old man's way of saying he trusted me. I wanted in because I trusted him. We were going to be O.K. I knew it. We would have money again. We would finish the second story of our house, and my mother would be happy again. They would both be happy. I had no idea that he was preparing to leave us.
I lingered at the top of the stairs, looking at the room we'd built. It was really something, even with the gaping hole where the television had been. I was proud of my work. A few steps down the hall, along the tiles I'd laid myself, was Andrés's room. I wasn't looking for anything in particular. We'd already taken his boom box and alarm clock. I turned on the lamp. In the closet, there were half a dozen pairs of shoes and button-down shirts in white and blue. I touched them all. I ran my fingers along the rack and found it: his gray wool suit. I'd just pulled it from the closet when my father walked in.
"What the fuck are you doing?" he hissed. "Turn that goddam light off!"
"I'm sorry," I said. We were in darkness again.
"We're leaving. Put that back," he said. "We can't sell that."
"We could."
"We're in a hurry, Chino. Let's go."
"It's for me," I said.
"This isn't a department store. You don't need it."
He was right. I didn't need it, wouldn't need it. Not until I wore it for my interview at El Clarín, seven years later. I knew it would take me a year or two to grow into it, if I grew into it at all. It was a dull, shapeless longing, but it was real. "I want this," I said, "for my birthday."
I could barely see him in the purple shadows.
"Your birthday?" my father said. He'd forgotten. His voice softened. "Well, then, take it."
I rode around the city in my green-and-white suit and thought about my mother. I put my article in an envelope, sealed it, and dropped it in the mail. I didn't see Villacorta, or check the paper to see if he'd published it. I broke away from Tonio and Jhon, paid them twenty soles for the suit and the shoes and the memories. I thanked them from the very bottom of my new clown heart. And I didn't do their act, or any act. I spent my savings. I put on the polka-dot suit and stepped into the unwieldy shoes. I painted my face in the dim reflection of the hallway mirror. I placed the red Ping-Pong ball over my nose, felt the tight pull of the rubber band against my hair. And I rode the buses, paying my fare like any other passenger, except that I was unlike any other passenger. I knew that I would see her. This was our city, hers and mine.
I rode to La Victoria, where the corner kids eyed me, wondering if it was worth their trouble to mug a clown. I walked the narrow streets, my shoes flopping on the crumbling sidewalks. I sat on a bench in front of Carmela's house and waited. My black brothers came and went to their schools, to their jobs. They didn't even shoot me a glance. I was part of the architecture. A cop stopped and asked if I was all right.
"Just resting, chief," I said.
Was I from around here?
"I'm Don Hugo's kid."
"Carmela's Hugo?" he asked. Then he left me alone.
Carmela came home, carrying dresses, and smiled at me because she smiled at everyone. Her door swung open wide, and from my bench I peered into her world, my mother's new world. And then things came at me in waves: the street, the house. I haven't seen you since you were this big, Carmela had said at the hospital. I remembered. When I was six, Don Hugo had taken me to see his mistress. I'd never seen a black person before. I cried and said she looked burnt. He hit me and told me to be nice to my tía. She grinned and pinched my cheek. Now I couldn't bring myself to ring the doorbell. I knew that she'd be kind, even with me dressed this way. As kind as she was to my mother. She'd answer my questions and tell me how she met my father, how she fell for him, the sweet things he'd told her. Carmela and my mother must have spoken of all this already. What revelations did I have for them, anyway? They had worked out the details of their parallel heartbreaks: who had him when, who had him first, who was innocent, who was guilty. And they'd forgiven him, and that was the most astounding thing of all.
Why were you always forgiving him, Ma? He told her everything first—about you, about me, about the work he did and planned to do. He let you swim in darkness, and wonder at the vacant spaces, and ask yourself what mistakes you'd made. And then he left us. And you forgave him, Ma. You forgave him.
After we broke into Andrés's house, the loot was split, but my mother and I saw none of it, except the gray wool suit. The next week, I found myself on my knees again, burnishing the lacquered floorboards of another house. Another Saturday, and then another. I went on three jobs with my father and his crew. I understand now that money must have been tight. He had four sons to support. We'd just finished a two-week job when Felipe came by with the van. I remember thinking it was strange that they hadn't given the place time to cool. I thought I understood the hustle. I asked my father about it.
"Shut up," he said. "Don't ask questions."
We drove through the dark streets of the city. I sat in the back, felt the van swaying. I had no idea where we were going, but when I got out I knew immediately where I was. I looked at my father, horrified, expecting some kind of explanation, but he just shrugged. Crazy things happen in the city.__ They boosted me over the wall, into the garden where I'd played as a child. I could see through the glass window, the high bookshelves against the far wall, the elegant leather sofas.
They were too rich and too trusting. Their watchman was asleep in a rickety wooden chair. I opened the garage door from the inside, and the man woke with a start. My father stepped in and broke his jaw. Felipe dragged him into the garden and tied him to a tree. The watchman sat there, blindfolded and gagged and bleeding, while we disassembled the house. Their possessions were so familiar that it was like stealing from myself.
It was terrifying and logical: the riskiest hit of all. I led Felipe and my father around the house like a tour guide: Don't forget the microwave and the blender my mother loves so much. And, in here, the old engineer's nifty calculator and the television with its remote control. There was something beautiful about our silent artistry. Everyone would be a suspect. The gardener, my mother, my father, me. Whichever members of the crew had worked on the house. And the watchman tied to the tree, bleeding into a rag.
The van was full. It was time to go. The watchman's chin was slumped into his chest, his breathing heavy. I felt the conviction that he, too, was one of us, and it disgusted me. It could have been anything: a stray light that shone on him, or a spasm in his face that made me think he was smiling. I kicked him. He snapped to attention, seeing only his blindfold. He struggled against the tree. I hocked something viscous and unclean on his forehead. The color of money.
My father called me, and we disappeared.
She left Carmela's and I followed her. She got on the bus at Manco Cápac. She wore her uniform, as clean and as white as a high summer cloud. She didn't notice me behind her, sat across from me innocently, not even looking in my direction. I closed my eyes, felt the rumble of the bus along the potholed avenue. The ticket collector sang the route: La Victoria, San Borja! La Victoria, San Borja! Between the standing passengers, I could still catch glimpses of her. No one sat in the empty seat beside me. Then she stood. She got off, and I followed.
I knew the way, of course, to the Azcárates' house, where I once kept my mother company and did my homework in the garden. The house my father and I had violated, nearly sacrificing her livelihood. But she had always been safe there. And, worse, I had, too. They'd welcomed me into their looted house, consoled me when I cried. You're too old for that, Chino. Look, they didn't steal the books.__ The old engineer with his generous heart, trying to make me feel better.
I trailed half a block behind her now, an expert in my clumsy green shoes, marching down the very center of an empty street. "Ma!" I shouted. "Ma!" She half turned, and then sped up at the sight of me. I rushed to keep pace with her. "Ma!" I shouted again. "Ma, it's Oscar! It's Chino!"
She stopped beneath a flowering tree. "Hijo?" she said. "Is that you?"
I hadn't seen her since the velorio. I had left her to bury the old man without me. She had held his hand and watched him die. She had put him in the earth and covered him.
"It's me, Ma."
"Chino! You scared me!"
"I'm sorry, Ma."
"Your nose, Chino?"
I pulled off my red nose, let it drop to the ground.
"And your shoes? What's all this?"
I stepped out of the clown shoes and kicked them toward the sidewalk. "I'm writing a story, Ma. For the paper."
She nodded, not understanding.
"I'm sorry," I repeated.
"Where have you been, Chino?"
"Here and there," I said. I took off my jester's hat. "I'm here now."
She took me in her arms and stroked my hair. She kissed my forehead and wiped the paint from my cheeks. "Are you all right?"
"I came to Carmela's, but I didn't knock."
"You should have," she said. "Will you?"
"I don't know," I said. "Did he ask about me?"
It was a travesty, my wanting to know, but I did. She held me tighter. My face paint was running, coming off in white streaks on the sleeve of my suit. "He missed you, Chino," she said.
I felt the warm salty wet of her cheek against mine, and it was good to be held.
"I missed you, too," my mother said.
"I won't leave you again," I told her. But a shiver passed over me. I knew in my heart that the clown was lying. ♦


text:
ROCKLEDGE, FL (August 9, 2013) — Health First Medical Group is pleased to announce George Tirlokhi as its new Director of Revenue Cycle. In this position, Tirlokhi is responsible for ensuring efficient and timely management of the physician billing offices.
Tirlokhi has extensive experience in hospital financial management. He most recently served as Director of Revenue Cycle for Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York, New York where he directed the revenue cycle operations for a medical institute with annual gross revenues in excess of $400 million and more than 200 providers. He also previously served as Assistant Director of Patient Accounting at Lakeland Regional Medical Center in Lakeland, FL and Director of Capital Planning and Budgeting at NYU Medical Center in New York.
George earned his Bachelor of Business Administration, Accounting and his Executive Master of Science in Finance from Baruch College in New York, NY. He is also a Certified Patient Accounts Manager with the American Association of Healthcare Administrative Management and a member of the Healthcare Financial Management Association.
# # #
About Health First
Health First is Central Florida's only fully integrated health system. With a mission to positively change the health and wellness of the communities we serve, Health First offers multiple commercial and Medicare health plan products, the latest technological advances and quality care through our four hospitals and numerous Outpatient & Wellness Services, including four fitness centers to help members of our community stay healthy. We offer Brevard's only Trauma Center, and the Health First Medical Group is the largest multi-specialty physician group in Brevard County.

subset: commoncrawl


text:
Delivery Truck Down! - Whoops!Posted in Whoops on June 26, 2014
Absolutely, Positively Stuck
Here are some pics of my driveway. My Yota was down because of a broken tie-rod. The FedEx guy was bringing me the part and slid over the side of my driveway. I had to hurry up and change the tie-rod and get out some chains and a snatch block and a winch…
Cody Dice
Via firstname.lastname@example.com
Submission Information
Send us your wheeling foul-ups! Letters must be signed by the vehicle's owner. Due to the large volume of mail we receive, we regret that not all submissions can be used and none will be returned. Digital photos must measure at least 1,600 by 1,200 pixels (or two megapixels) and be saved as a TIFF, an EPS, or a maximum-quality JPEG file. Write to: Whoops!, 4-Wheel & Off-Road, 831 S. Douglas St., El Segundo, CA 90245 Email to: firstname.lastname@example.com
Get even more 4-Wheel & Off-Road on your computer or smart phone at these sites


text:
You might think that you garden just so that you can enjoy the pretty flowers. Or so that you have nice landscaping around your house. You might plant shrubs for privacy screening or as a focal point next to your front door. When you plant shrubs, though, you're also giving a leg up to wildlife--something that's sorely needed in this day and age of rampant development.
Whether you specifically intend to create a wildlife garden, or welcoming wildlife is a secondary benefit to your landscaping, when you plant shrubs you do the following:
- Provide a place for birds to nest
- Provide food for birds, butterflies, and caterpillars
- Provide cover for birds and other animals
- Create corridors through which wildlife can safely pass in urban areas
Birds with food, water, and shelter will fledge (raise) more chicks to maturity. And it's as easy as selecting the right plants!
Gardening for Birds and Butterflies
Before we get to the plants, let's think about water. The National Wildlife Foundation recommends these types of water supplies for habitat gardens:
- Birdbath
- Lake
- Stream
- Seasonal Pool
- Ocean
- Water Garden/Pond
- River
- Butterfly Puddling Area
- Rain Garden
- Spring
Planting shrubs increases the amount of food available to birds in a variety of ways. Some birds eat berries, and will benefit from holly plants and viburnums in the landscape.
Butterflies and hummingbirds sip nectar from flowers. If you want to lure these winged wonders into the garden you need to plant nectar plants such as butterfly bushes and abelia.
Another important part of wildlife gardening is shelter. Birds need places to build nests. Small mammals need cover. One of our favorite shrubs for shelter is the Beautybush. This lovely native shrub does double-duty with gorgeous purple berries that feed the birds in the fall.
Don't forget the evergreen shrubs, too! They work hard for you and for your feathered and furry friends in the winter, providing good cover when deciduous shrubs are bare.
Go Away Deer!
There's one type of wildlife that pretty much nobody wants in their garden because they'll eat your plants to the ground: deer. And while there aren't any plants that are 100% deer-proof (a hungry deer will eat anything), there are lots of deer-resistant shrubs. These are shrubs that either don't taste good or don't feel good (thorny) for deer to eat.
Shop all deer-resistant shrubs >>
(Pictured, right, get deer to steer clear by planting Sunjoy™ Mini Saffron Berberis as a landscape border.)


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Firm Overview
Carbonaro, Carbonaro & Brune, P.C. is located in Auburn, New York and is committed to providing its clients with the highest level of service possible. Our firm takes pride in its strong community ties, dedication to client satisfaction, and utmost respect for the ethics and responsibilities that the practice of law demands.
We are committed to utilizing the latest technology and business tools in order to provide our clients with prompt and efficient legal services.
It is our goal to achieve the highest level of client satisfaction while at the same time upholding the standards of the profession.
The firm is devoted to assisting its clients in every aspect of a problem, whether it is legally or personally. Our loyalty to clients' needs will not be compromised and will always be our most important objective.


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Simon´s forum http://www.cluesforum.info have had strange discussions lately, that seems to be intentionally confusing.
Can we check if Simon is still OK ?
(Impulse law don't work in vacuum + that the Earth don't orbit the Sun.)
Tufa » 16 Sep 2017, 08:04 wrote:Now I ROBOT, need to go and connect myself to a powerbank.
Tufa » 16 Sep 2017, 19:42 wrote:That the "Truth Movement" web pages are far from clean from influence, is rather clear.
I see, as an example, that "You don't really care". In case most other, who pass by here, also "ahh -- I don't care", then we go a little step backwards.
This is clearly a real picture from the 911 event
agraposo wrote:when I perused Tufa's blog some years ago, I found some references to the perps using a scale model in some shots. This helped me to understand some videos.
Tufa » September 17th, 2017, 4:49 pm wrote:Norway had A-bombs, that they could roll out from the mountain and load and fire without any secret codes using Norwegian personal only.
Flabbergasted » September 17th, 2017, 10:31 pm wrote:agraposo wrote:when I perused Tufa's blog some years ago, I found some references to the perps using a scale model in some shots. This helped me to understand some videos.
I for one think it quite likely scale models were used in the making of the 9/11 reality show. This is of course a matter of entirely secondary importance, but it is a possible explanation for certain details and textures (lifelike damage, squibs and smoke in the wrong places, debris, etc) which play such an important part in Richard Gage´s gatekeeping efforts.
http://cluesforum.info/viewtopic.php?f= ... 8#p2395053
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1979 Chevrolet K30 Cheyenne - Backward GlancesPosted in Features on June 25, 2014
When the 1979 Chevy trucks debuted, it was only the third year for the K30 1-ton 4x4. The 1979 Chevy K30 line in particular followed a market trend toward moving the 1-ton 4x4 into the mainstream. RV'ers were getting more serious with their equipment, and a ¾-ton simply wasn't enough beef for many.
The 1979 Chevy K30 trucks came as a regular-cab longbed (131.5-inch wheelbase) or the Bonus Cab/Crew Cab (164.5-inch wheelbase), which were two terms for their four-door trucks. What's the difference? The Crew Cab came with a rear seat and the Bonus Cab didn't. The K30 GVW ranged from the base 8,600 pounds, 9,200 pounds (SRW), and 10,000 pounds (DRW).
The base engine in the 1979 Chevy K30 was the venerable 292ci (4.8L) inline-six (except in California, where the 350ci V-8 was the base), backed up by the Saginaw SM465 four-speed and a married NP205 T-case. Axles were a Dana 60 up front, a full-float 14-bolt in back, and standard 4.56:1 cogs (4.11:1 for the V-8s). If you got the 10,000-pound GVW dually, you got a Dana 70 rear axle. No matter which, you could opt for an automatic (TH350 for the I-6, TH400 for V-8s), which also gave you full-time 4WD (whether you wanted it or not) in the form of the now generally-sneered-at NP203 T-case.
Going up the engine food-chain, the legendary 350ci (5.7L) V-8 was next -- an option that cost you an extra $435 at list price. You had the choice of the four-speed manual or the automatic, again getting the NP203 with the slushbox. At the top for 4x4s was the 400ci (6.6L) small-block V-8, which only came with the automatic and the full-time NP203 T-case. The '79 model year was the last gasp of the full-time craze in GM pickups due to the mileage and power losses.
As a side note, the engine and GVW combos changed after 1979 due to catalytic converter requirements. As of 1979, any truck above an 8,500-pound GVW didn't need cats. Those old pellet-style GM cats really cut into the power output, and a hard-working truck could really heat them up too -- sometimes even roasting the floorboards in the process. Plus, the cats cost an honest 10hp (at least) with a V-8. The K20s took the hardest hit in 1979, having a base GVW of 6,800 and optional rates of 7,500 and 8,400 pounds. For 1980, Chevy gave the top GVW K20 an 8,600-pound rating, and the base K30 GVW was bumped to 9,200 for the SRW trucks. That 8,600 GVW K20 truck didn't have all the beef of the K30 (most notably the Dana 60 front axle) but it did bring that K20 out of the cat requirement. GM still had a lower GVW K20 that required cats. Unfortunately for K20 buyers, they couldn't get the 400ci V-8 after 1979, but K30 buyers could. It wasn't until 1981 that a big-block was made optional for K30 4x4s.
In the realm of trim packages, there were four to choose from. The base level was Custom Deluxe. You could order some goodies a la carte, but the base trim left you with the "numbutt special" bench seats, black rubber floor coverings, painted bumper, and little else. Next up was the Scottsdale ($318), which gave you a better seat, color-keyed rubber floor covering, a headliner, upgraded interior trim panels, some bright trim, a chrome bumper, lighter, dome light, and a few more little goodies.
Next up was the Cheyenne ($481), which added to the Scottsdale by including carpets, upgraded interior trim, a bit more exterior trim, and a better steering wheel. Top of the line was the Silverado ($657), which added to the Cheyenne by including a different look, the gauge package in a "Deluxe" dash, and even more and different exterior trim. All the prices given are for a Fleetside truck with the bench seat. The bucket seat packages were optional, and the Stepside truck packages were a little different.
The truck you see here is a one-owner 1979 Chevy K30 Cheyenne, originally from California. It's a nicely equipped truck, with a 400 V-8, automatic, 4.10:1 axle ratio, auxiliary fuel tank, A/C, special two-tone paint, and a sliding rear window. It's only showing about 42,000 original miles and was used by the owner to haul a fifth-wheel travel trailer. It's another gem from Brian Steinbrook's inventory of fine vintage 4x4s.
The Big Kahuna powerplant for the 1979 4x4s was the 400ci small-block V-8. Sorry, no 454 for you Four Wheeler guys. The 400 out-horsepowered the 350 by 25 and out-torqued it by 40 lb-ft. At some point, the original owner installed a dual exhaust system, which likely made towing his ffth-wheel a bit easier. Dual exhaust was still on the options list for the K30 in '79 ($39), but not in California where this truck was purchased. The last year for the 400 in trucks was 1980.
The Cheyenne interior was a nice place to work by 1970s standards. This truck is unusual with a genuine radio delete: a radio is not listed on the build sheet and it has a radio delete plate. The interior color was called Camel Tan, and this is the Custom vinyl bench seat. Buckets with a center console was optional, as was a Custom Cloth. A total of five colors were available.
The 1979 Chevy K30 had the dubious honor of being the last year for the full-time NP203 four-wheel-drive system. It really wasn't a horrible setup, nor particularly weak. It just cut into fuel economy and soaked up power. This NP203 likely has an aftermarket part-time conversion, judging by the locking hubs up front.
There weren't many differences between the 8,400-pound GVW K20 and the 8,600-pound GVW K30, but the Dana 60 was one of them. The Dana 44, or 10-bolt front (both were seen in 1979) were rated for 3,800 pounds, but the D60 was rated at 4,500 pounds. The high GVW K20 had the same front spring rates as the 8,600-pound K30, but the K30 had stronger rear springs, plus auxiliaries.
|1979 Chevrolet K30 Cheyenne
|Brian Steinbrook
|Estimated value:
|400ci V-8
|Power (hp):
|185 @ 3,600 rpm
|Torque (lb-ft):
|300 @ 2,400 rpm
|Bore & stroke (in):
|4.126 x 3.75
|Comp. ratio:
|TH400 automatic
|Transfer case:
|NP203, full-time
|Front axle:
|Dana 60
|Rear axle:
|GM 10.5-in 14-bolt
|Axle ratio:
|9.50-16.5D (orig.)
|L x W x H (in):
|212.1 x 79.6 x 74.7
|Wheelbase (in):
|GVW (lbs):
|Curb weight (lbs):
|Fuel capacity (gal):
|20 (main), 20 (aux.)
|Min. grd. clearance (in):
|Approach angle (deg):
|Departure angle (deg):
|Ramp breakover (deg):


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Community Music School will host an Open House on Wednesday, Jan. 9, from 4:30–7 p.m. for anyone who would like to tour the school and learn more about the school's music programs as well as have the opportunity to preview young child classes offered by Milestones In Music at 4:30 and 5:30p.m. Walk-ins welcome. Contact CMS at 610-489-3676 or firstname.lastname@example.com for more information about appropriate ages to begin music lessons, instruments and classes offered.
Community Music School is a non-profit school of music celebrating over 20 years of high quality music instruction since 1991. CMS is located at 775 W. Main Street in Trappe and provides instruction for all instruments to students of all ages and musical ability, without regard to their particular background or ability to pay. For more information about programs and faculty members, please visit the school's website at www.cmsmusic.org or call 610-489-3676.


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Americans aren't borrowing too much — rather they are investing in a better life — and almost everything Sen. Elizabeth Warren has told you about consumer credit is wrong.
Those are some of the takeaways from a new book called Consumer Credit and the American Economy, according to one of its authors, Todd Zywicki, a law professor at George Mason University.
Zywicki is a longtime vocal critic of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) — the government agency that was the brainchild of Warren prior to her becoming senator and was mandated by the Dodd-Frank Act — which seeks to protect consumers from abusive financial products and practices.
But in an interview with ThinkAdvisor, the law professor and author worried that such products and practices are not clearly defined by statute and that the CFPB's entire approach is uneconomic.
While admitting his area of expertise is consumer credit, he says the debate over whether a fiduciary standard should be imposed on all financial advisors is analogous in that, from an economic perspective, any rule change will have a cost.
In the interview, the bankruptcy law professor eschewed discussion of securities regulation, but sticking to his area of expertise said that "when it comes to consumer credit, Washington's approach is to wish away unintended consequences."
He cites as an example new rules issued late last year by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency that effectively persuaded banks to eliminate direct deposit loans that the OCC deemed as essentially high-cost payday loans.
But in so doing, the OCC essentially left poor consumers at the mercy of payday loan companies and bank overdraft fees by limiting market competition and consumer choice.
"You really have to think about the cost of doing things," Zywicki says, noting that consumers with impaired credit will have to pay higher interest so well-intended rules that limit their choices will effectively increase their costs.
The free-market oriented law professor says he is not opposed to regulation per se.
"I distinguish between what I think of as market-reinforcing and market-replacing regulation," a distinction he feels that Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat, and many in Washington with similar mindsets fail to grasp.
"Market-replacing regulation includes setting interest rate ceilings and banning certain products like payday loans. Market-reinforcing regulation includes sophisticated laws…that harness the forces of competition [to promote consumer choice]," he says.
Apart from regulation, Zywicki's new book seeks to clarify two other key points he thinks that Warren seems not to understand.
One of those issues concerns why people borrow. The professor says there is a prevalent belief that "people borrow to live beyond their means and sustain a level of expenditure that is not viable" — in other words that other people use consumer credit irresponsibly.
But Zywicki says that is not so. "Households and consumers use credit for the same reason businesses do: "to buy capital goods, and smooth income and expenses; that's overwhelmingly the reason people use credit cards."
By buying a washing machine, he says, "people don't need to schlep to the laundromat each evening; [that's] no different than a construction company buying a back hoe rather than hiring 10 guys to dig a hole with shovels.'
Another key myth, he says, is that people have too much debt because of credit cards — that they are goaded into buying things they don't want.
Zywicki says the burden of consumer indebtedness has not increased over time, but people's purchasing power has increased as credit choices have expanded.
Forty years ago, he said, someone wanting to buy a new refrigerator or bedroom set went to the dealer, signed a finance agreement, paid 40% interest plus an application fee and made costly payments for 36 or more months.
"Today we just put it on a credit card; it's just better" than the installment loans of the past.
High-charging personal finance companies that bought the loans retailers made — "all that stuff is gone," he says, adding that the effective APRs have come down.
Returning to the core subject of regulation, the professor and author says that "history tell us you cannot reduce the need for credit among consumers" and further that one of the unintended consequences of regulation is that "it invariably ends up hurting those we want to help."
In other words, the primary victims of well-intentioned but paternalistic bureaucrats, he says, are "low-income people who are bearing the brunt" of regulations concerning financial inclusion and servicing the unbanked.
The Credit Card Act of 2009, for example, "absolutely pummeled low-income consumers" by raising costs and limiting access to more affordable credit.
Similarly, the CFPB's qualified mortgage rule "undermines the ability of community banks to use their knowledge of customers to design products that work for them." By pricing these institutions out of the market, the ironic result he says — "in light of the financial crisis" — is that big banks are "gobbling" market share.
Zywicki doesn't disagree with Warren about everything. He agrees with her that Dodd-Frank has not ended "too big to fail," and says that there was "unquestionably a problem with mortgage debt" leading to the financial crisis.
He adds that "we've seen an unbelievable rise in student loan debt, which seems to be a problem, especially when it interacts with one-size-fits-all regulation that creates problems with people getting housing."
But a key concept he wants readers to understand is that consumer loan debt is unlike the federal government's debt, which he says entails "borrowing from the future to fund consumption today, such as [future payments to] retirees."
The difference is that the entitlement state is problematic because it is not a form of investment, whereas consumers generally borrow to buy houses and cars and to increase human capital through student loans.
[The postwar affordable suburban homes] in "Levittown was financed by consumer credit," he notes. If you think leaving tiny urban apartments with rented furniture for your own home in the suburbs is a problem, "then credit cards are a problem; but if lives are better off, then you have a different perspective on things," he says.
"As long as there has been consumer credit, there have been people who have misused it…and people who have been worried about how others use it; but overwhelmingly people use consumer credit to make their lives better off," he says.
In 1968, a congressional study found that loansharking was the mafia's No. 2 source of revenue. Since people are going to access credit, it is best to promote competition and access rather than leave poor consumers especially few options.
"We need to respect consumers as grown-ups," Zywicki concludes. "Recognize that consumers make mistakes, but understand that people know better what to do with their lives than well-intentioned bureaucrats."
Check out Wall Street's Next Political Storm on ThinkAdvisor.


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Indonesia's archipelago comprises approximately 17,000 islands, of which around 990 are permanently inhabited. There are 7 major biogeographic regions in Indonesia, centered on the major islands and their surrounding seas. Conservation International considers Indonesia to be one of the 17 "megadiverse" countries, with 2 of the world's 25 "hotspots", 18 World Wildlife Fund's "Global 200" ecoregions and 24 of Bird Life International's "Endemic Bird Areas". It also possesses 10% of the world's flowering species (estimated 25,000 flowering plants, 55% endemic) and ranks as one of the world's centers for agrobiodiversity of plant cultivars and domesticated livestock. For fauna diversity, about 12% of the world's mammals (515 species) occur in Indonesia, ranking it second, after Brazil, at the global level. About 16% of the world's reptiles (781 species) and 35 species of primate place Indonesia fourth in the world. Further, 17% of the total species of birds (1,592 species) and 270 species of amphibians place Indonesia in the fifth and sixth ranks, respectively, in the world.
The main factors affecting biodiversity loss and species extinction in Indonesia are habitat degradation and fragmentation, landscape changes, overexploitation, pollution, climate change, alien species, forest and land fires, and the economic and political crises occurring in the country.
In 1993, the National Development Planning Agency produced the Biodiversity Action Plan for Indonesia (BAPI). The document was published prior to CBD ratification in 1994. The BAPI prioritized in situ conservation measures, both inside and outside protected areas, as well as ex situ conservation. In 2003, a second document titled the "Indonesian Biodiversity Strategy and Action Plan (IBSAP)" was developed with a focus on achieving five goals: 1) to encourage changes in attitude and behavior of Indonesian individuals and society, as well as in existing institutions and legal instruments, so as to increase concern about conservation and utilization of biodiversity, for the welfare of the community, in harmony with national laws and international conventions; 2) to apply scientific and technological inputs, and local wisdom; 3) to implement balanced conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity; 4) to strengthen institutions and law enforcement; and 5) to resolve conflicts over natural resources. NBSAP implementation is on a voluntary basis and no coordination mechanisms are established to monitor and evaluate implementation.
In situ conservation is carried out through the establishment of conservation areas, such as biosphere reserves, wildlife sanctuaries, national parks, ecotourism parks, forest parks and hunting parks. Coverage of these areas increased from 7.628 million ha in 1981 to 27.968 million ha in 2007. Community-based forestry projects, covering 2 million ha, have also been established. As a result of ex situ conservation measures, the number of species of flora and fauna being bred in captivity increased from 171 species in 2006 to 416 species in 2008.
Biodiversity issues have been integrated into the sectoral strategic plans of the Ministry of Marine Affairs and Fisheries, Ministry of Forestry, Agency for Agriculture Research and Development (under the Ministry of Agriculture), and the Research Center for Biology of the Indonesian Institute of Sciences.
Indonesia is in the process of updating the Indonesia Biodiversity Strategy and Action Plan (2003) to 2020. The updated IBSAP will be mainstreamed into sectoral policies and programmes through its integration in the Medium-term National Development Plan (2014-2019). The updated IBSAP will also include elements for monitoring and evaluating implementation at the national and local levels.


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Tucked away on the west side of the small town of Broad Channel in the middle of Jamiaca Bay is a narrow, dead end, street that goes by the name of West 12th Road. Those of us who live there know that the nice part about living in a small town is that when you are not quite sure what is going on, someone else always does! [Peter J. Mahon West 12th Road, Broad Channel]
Saturday, December 1, 2018
Assemblywoman Stacey Pheffer Amato - Dist. 23 News/Updates
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