My Dream To Be a Mariachi Singer

We are passing the shanty towns of the Cienéga, some half sunken in water. People in worn out t-shirts and cut-off jeans amble about the sandy streets lined with scrap-metal and plywood huts, on top of which corrugated steel roofs are held down with cement blocks, tied with string and wired with clothes hangers against the coastal winds. Half buried tires painted pastel colors mark the boundaries of yards, and awnings composed of palm fronds shield sinking porches from the sun. Puddles, which are full of garbage and the color of Pepto-Bismol, stagnate a little ways from the houses. A girl blows a kiss to me as the bus passes.

I’m in Colombia, ten years, four languages and many solitary voyages after my first solo trip when I was 17. My bus has left Cartagena, city of sin, bound for Bogotá, city of smog. I haven’t slept for a while. And I have three grams of cocaine left from the seven my friends and I bought for fifteen bucks from a squat speed-freak of a man who ran around our table in a rooftop steakhouse in Santa Marta, giving all of us five and calling us brother. He showed up on a moped after our Colombian friends asked the six and a half foot tall cook if he knew where we could score some weed. That steakhouse is the best I’ve ever been to, for the money; you eat in the open air and a long lean steak with potatoes and salad is 2.50 US$. Fuck yeah, brother.

That night, Saturday night, our bus creeps through the crowded main street of a village, we, behind glass windows trapped, hear garbled music and stare out at the lights, the rustling of bodies, and the flashing of eyes made heavy and carnal with eye-shadow. The bus lurks on. There is an entire soccer team of seventeen-year-olds with their hair hi-lighted, gelled, and spiked, who are constantly swearing and gawking at the girls on the street. I repeatedly trouble the wrinkly white-haired man with the trucker hat next to me, to go to the tiny bathroom, where I stab a key into a minuscule plastic bag full of white powder which I greedily inhale through my nostrils and smear upon my gums. Get it. I come back to my seat, climbing over the old man. He remarks from time to time on the village we are passing, and how he used to know a girl there many years ago. His Spanish sounds like my grandpa’s English: country-style, rural, farmy. I look down at his hands, just like my grandpa’s, huge and calloused with big clumsy fingers like the Hulk. My mind soars on cocaine wings…

Sholeh Dalai

Our first meeting took place at a Brazilian feijoada at Laura’s in Chelsea. A Flamenco guitarist’s nimble fingers plucked at his nylon strings and we all reclined about in the shadows, as if in an opium den. Suddenly, a piercing cry broke my repast and I looked up to see an imposing figure with high heeled black boots and tightly-curled dark maroon hair. She was singing in an unrecognizable language, which I learned from the others was Farsi. There was tenderness in her voice at first, but it became shrill and startling as she expressed loneliness and heartbreak in universal and intuitively understood tones, the tones of agony. She and the guitarist blended elements from the middle-east, Spain, and the Blues, when she started scatting. I’d never heard the like. This is Sholeh, and singing is only one of her hobbies; she’s actually a painter.