My abuelo seemed to me, a big guy with a big nose and a big face, who always dressed in a very distinct way. It was always copper slacks with a white v-neck short sleeve. The ‘v’ always plunged down toward the scar left over from his open-heart surgery. He would terrorize me and my sister with that scar; ask us if we wanted to see it. “No way!” I’d shriek. Up would come that white v-neck, and there, in the center of his nascent pectorals, was the crumpled-up line of scar tissue. He cheated at Monopoly, and lectured me too often. And one Christmas Eve he even told me he was sleeping over in our living room and that he’d brought his gun. He was going to stay up late and kill Santa Claus in the night. My grandfather died from complications in the hospital when I was a teenager. He barely remembered who or where he was before slipping into a coma. He stayed there until my mom made the decision to take him off life support. I can remember watching my mom and uncle sit in the living room staring into space, bleary-eyed after that. They’d drift into stories: bad omens and jokes he’d tell. Shell-shocked.
As I work on my novel and short stories I’ve been thinking about my abuelo lately. I’ve recently been leaning more on my personal experience in my writing. It’s the difference between a good lie and a compelling lie, and my approach to stories is to work and massage the lies until they feel real. That’s the only way I know how to do this thing and it’s definitely something I picked up from my grandfather. This blog and the novel I’m gearing up to finish is the hardest I’ve pushed to express my latin roots. So while I was groping for a blog name, I found myself thinking about those things he would say in Spanish. La historia me absolverá. It means, ‘the story will absolve me’. ButI found out that he was quoting Fidel Castro so I gave that a wide berth. Scorched earth. But when my grandfather, Raphael, use to teach my mom or uncle to parallel park, he would tell them: “Dale dale, el golpe avisa”. That’s funny. That means, ‘Don’t worry. You’ll know when to stop as soon as you feel the hit’. Now that’s something to consider.
So often in life, we have to jump into things head first. We have ‘X’ amount of years of instruction, and then there’s a certain expectation: ‘Now it’s time to go do the thing’. And often the thing we want is beyond the purview of all the instruction we’ve gathered. Marriage, or kids, or leasing a home on the west side. My grandfather saw Fidel Castro take power in Cuba and knew he had to leave before the island’s extreme poverty claimed his children. He had never lived or traveled outside of Cuba. Sometimes we go until the hit. Every day actually. The novel I’m working on concerns itself with these themes.
The novel in question is still a bouncing newborn so I won’t go to deep into detail yet. I will use this blog as a place to shed some light on the research I’ve been doing, equal parts card conjuring, and Fluxus movement performance art. It’s a strange story. I’ll dump writing here regularly, book reviews, travel writing, and I’ll flex some small excerpts here too. But I also want to hear from you. Use the contact button. Let’s have words together.
Most of all, thank you for reading.
Fox Mederos
El Golpe Avisa 