Traveler
(Part III: New York)

            The famous open ticket my mother had insisted on buying for Lalo is what got him to New York. We were just a short time away from returning to Mexico, but Lalo’s best friend, Jorge, was living in Manhattan at the time and had also spoken to him and convinced him NYC was the place to be, musically speaking. After a brief period with us, Lalo rented an apartment in SoHo and moved there with a whole bunch of things my mom gave him to start off with and a plethora of giant roaches he told me he learned to scare off by stomping his feet before turning on the lights so he wouldn’t have to see them scamper away. He also told me there was an old LP nailed high up on one of the walls. There seemed to be a hole behind it, but he never got up the courage to take down the record and see what was there.

             One of the first day jobs he got was as a dish washer. Apparently, he was so incredibly good at this he was actually “pilfered” by another restaurant with offers of higher pay. At night, he played music in a punk rock group at the famous CBGB during the time when The Ramones, Patti Smith and the B52’s were playing there. At some point, someone in Patti Smith’s group approached him and asked if he would play for them, but Lalo panicked and said he wasn’t good enough. I remember his talking with my mom about it but although she told him to go for it, he didn’t feel he could.

            In New York, Lalo lived many of his now classical “adventures”; things that could only possibly happen to him. One night, for example, he was out walking very late at night when some guys came out of an alley, switchblades out. Lalo raised his hands and told the guys to take what they wanted. One of them said something to another…in Spanish! Immediately, Lalo began to speak in Spanish too, telling the guys he was from Mexico.  Naturally, they instantly put their weapons away and escorted him back to his own neighborhood, telling him to watch out for himself and to be careful where he went at night.

            Lalo’s apartment was on the “border” of Little Italy. It was incredible to see how the neighborhood changed by just crossing a street. On Lalo’s side, everything was dirty, grungy, old. On the other side, everything was clean, the streets were swept and I remember even the fire hydrants were painted green, white and red. One night, when Lalo was getting to his apartment after playing a gig, he was surprised to see a crowd gathered at the foot of his building together with fire trucks and patrol cars. When he asked what had happened, he was informed that there had been a fire; his apartment, and only his apartment, had been torched! He stood there among the crowd, stunned. All of a sudden, someone came up behind him and shoved something into his hand. He turned around to see who it had been, but he didn’t catch sight of the person. When he looked down, he saw all his papers: passports, id, birth certificate, everything. Evidently, someone gave the order to burn his things, but had the odd courtesy of saving his important documents. When I asked him much later who he thought it had been, or what reason they had had to do it, he told me he had always suspected it was someone from Little Italy, but that he really and truly had no idea of who it had been or why. Could it have been a case of mistaken identity? Was there something valuable hidden behind the mysterious LP? And who called my mother in Mexico to tell her there had been a fire hours before we heard from Lalo? None of these questions were ever answered.

            Lalo must have experienced many other things during his time in New York, but those he kept to himself. I know there was a point during his time there where he literally had no money and had to live in “Alphabet City”, a neighborhood of Manhattan which, at that time, had incredibly dangerous areas and empty buildings where people squatted and illegal activities were rampant.

            He stayed in NYC only one or two years. On his way down to Mexico for a visit, he stopped at Davenport, Iowa. There, Mimi, our grandmother, offered to put him through college if he stayed with her, which started a new phase in his journeys.

Susana Olivares Bari