Philadelphia

“We have to study somewhere else,” Andres said. “They are, how you say…. All the people on the street are coming here for Octoberfest—in the back yard.”

Andres and I trade off tutoring sessions twice a week: one day he helps me with my Spanish, the next time I help him with his English. English lessons are usually at the house he stays at with his host family, in West Philly, and we study in the back yard when the weather is nice.

“Octoberfest; is it a big holiday here?” Andres asked.

“No, not really,” I laugh. “It is big with college students. In the United States it is really just a holiday to drink beer.”

We worked through the second chapter of Andres’ workbook on English idioms. Today it was to “take after” someone, “at all” (as in “I don’t like Italian food at all”), to “take turns” and “go to pieces.” As usual, we alternated our attention between the material in the book and discussions about language, travel and culture.

Partway through our lesson, an older woman (the neighbor from across the street) came over to see Andres’ host mother. As she walked up the steps on to porch she misjudged the height of the last step and tripped, grabbing the railing and falling to one knee. Andre (and I) both got up quickly to help her, with Andres coming over and (attempting to) support her arm while she got back to her feet. She was a little flustered but okay, and after she goes into the house Andres and I sit back down to study.

“Did you hear what she said?” Andres quietly asked me. “When I went over to help her, she said ‘Don’t touch me.’”

I didn’t hear her say that, and told him.

“Why did she say that?” he asked.

“It probably wasn’t you,” I reassured him. “It was probably her. When you’re in the United States and something like that happens,” I sighed, “you should probably say first, ‘Can I help you up?’”

“Can I help you up,” he practiced.

The day’s English lesson became a discussion on the cultural difference on touching others in Latin America vs. the United States. I talked about how, in the U.S.—especially in the Northeast—we have difficulty with touching.

“You see how men do it, yes?” I mined the hyper-masculine handshake, half-embrace and shoulder pat. “It is very… ritualized? Formal.”

“Yes, I have seen,” he said, and I (tried to) put into words our difficulty with showing affection with touch. I gave him my opinion; how I think in the U.S. we sexualize everything and don’t know how to separate friendly affection with sexual affection.

“In Colombia, it is different. With my friends, we are always….”  he mimed shoulder squeezing and affectionate pats, and draping arms over each other’s shoulders, leaning on each other. He mentioned meeting the sister of one of his teachers on the subway: he’s from Colombia; she’s from Venezuela.

“I met her, and it is like…” He mines kissing her on each check. He pauses, looking at his hands. “I miss it so much, and I never know,” he said, with a mixture exasperation and sadness. “It is, how do you say…. a needed… a necessary….”

“A necessity,” I said

“Yes!” he agreed.

We went back to English idioms, occasionally revisiting our conversation about cultural differences between here and his home country. At the end, as I was packing up my things, I said—knowing he wouldn’t understand—many of our problems with sex and drinking comes from the Puritans.

“Puritans?” he asked.

“The people who came over and founded our country,” I said, knowing that oversimplified things a bit.

“Ah yes, Puritanical!” he said. I was surprised he knew the word.

“We are told sex and drinking is bad, where in other countries people start to drink when they are young—and they think, ‘It’s just sex.’ We aren’t allowed to drink here until we are 21—so we don’t know how to drink,” I said. "In New Orleans they know how to drink—the people that live there. But when other people visit, they are peeing in the street and throwing up on people’s porches.”

Andres laughed, understanding what I was saying—at least superficially.

And this is why we celebrate Octoberfest, I thought, as I hopped on my bike.

Session #5 (NYC)

When I walked into Shinji’s studio for my appointment, Johnny Cash was playing, coming out of his computer.

“You like country music?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said. “You like?”

“Yes, very much,” I answered.

While I was getting undressed and into my fundoshi, he explained he’d recently gone to the New Jersey tattoo convention and saw a country band playing there, and he had been gone on to hang out with a few of the guys.

“They teach me how to play country music. I’ve been practicing,” he said, pointing at a guitar in the other room that I hadn’t noticed when I came in. I was trying to picture this, wondering what songs they had taught him, what songs he had been practicing. I didn’t ask.

“Stand up please,” he said, after I had my Japanese almost-underwear tied. I stood facing the wall and he started to draw on my back.

“You know moonshine?” he asked, continuing to draw.

“Yes,” I laughed.

“I try,” he said. “Is good.”

He tattooed me while Johnny Cash continued to play, interspersed with Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson duets. (I remember “Luckenbach Texas” playing while he tattooed a particularly sensitive part of my spine.) There were a few ads between songs, so he was streaming music; it wasn’t from his own library. I wondered what “station” he typed in. I was most likely “Johnny Cash,” but the selection leaned decidedly toward his “outlaw country” period and contemporaries—as that was most likely the music the redneck-aspiring moonshine-drinking tattoo artists Shinji met would have introduced him to.

(I’m assuming they were urban-living—or at least suburban—tattoo artists aspiring to a sort of rural downward mobility. At least this is what I expect from attendees to a tattoo convention on New Jersey. I could be wrong—and he may have encountered some authentic, Southern good-ole-boys—but I’m betting the moonshine most likely was the type you buy at a liquor store, in an “authentic” mason jar. Where is the nearest corn-liquor still to New Jersey, anyway?)

By the second hour, the music took a surreal turn, as he tattooed while we heard Elvis’ “Hound Dog” followed by “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” and then Kenny Roger’s singing “The Gambler” a few songs later—the last two giving me mini-flashbacks of being a kid in the late 70s, wondering what the nine-year-old me would make of the current setting. I remember thinking that the only thing stranger would be if “Dueling Banjos” came on—and sure enough, a few songs later, it did. It was one of those times where you just take a step out of yourself and try to make sense of the place you’re in. For me, it was being tattooed by a Japanese, newly-converted country music fan in New York while  “Dueling Banjos”—a song I probably heard last in its entirety coming out of my parents eight-track player when I lived in Georgia—was playing in the background. Weird.

Between tattooing, during one of the drawings sessions, he said, “I said maple leaves last time, yes?”

“Yes,” I said, having gotten used to the idea since my last visit.

“You already have peonies on the front,” he said, “So it should be peonies.”

“Okay,” I said. “I like peonies.”

I wonder how much of this he already has planned, and how much he’s deciding as he goes.

“Maybe green fire?” he said, showing some excitement at the idea.

“Green fire?” I asked. He pulled up a picture on his computer.

“It looks like…plants,” I said, picturing a dragon/Christmas tree hybrid across my back.

“Plants…? Aah…plants,” he said, as he understood.

I didn’t say any more, knowing that I had some time before he would decide.

We just worked on scales today, which was fine with me. I wasn’t really up to him continuing on my other ass cheek. “We do that next time,” he said. Sitting on the two-hour bus ride back to Philly would be a lot easier this time than next.

At the end, as I dressed, he said to me, “I need to reschedule next visit. Is okay?”

“Is okay,” I said.

“I need…vacation,” he laughed.

I laughed with him. “Where are you going?”

“Maybe to the beach,” he said. “Maybe to…Tennessee.”

“There’s a lot of country music in Tennessee, I said, surprised.

“Yes, I know,” he laughed again.

“You can see Elvis’ house,” I offered.

New York City