So apparently “Hispanic” is about as bad as “spic” these days and you’re supposed to say Latin. I learned the hard way that going stoop to stoop in Washington Heights asking for a “Hispanic” host is about as smart as soliciting a cheerful tap dance from some colored fellows in Bed-Stuy. Unless you’re into being pelted with candy by a group of 12-year-olds, it’s best to carpe diem and call everyone a dead language from the fifth century. THEY’RE COOL WITH THE ’BREWS—BUT NOT TOO COOL
Mi nueva abuela Esmerelda’s web-savvy daughter, Monica, fixed me up with her childhood bedroom in her mom’s third-floor 181st Street walk-up. The next morning, after dropping my stuff in my new digs, I went with Esmerelda to the bodega to get some milk and ’maters. On the way back, we took a detour up a flight of stairs to a cul-de-sac saddled by swanky fake-Tudor-looking buildings. “This is where all the Jewry people live,” she told me, making a putting-on-a-yarmulke gesture to clarify. Before the influx of Dominicans in the 60s and 70s, Washington Heights was a predominantly German-Jewish section. There’s still a good deal of them by the river. After making sure I wasn’t Jewry, she explained further, “They are not bad people or something, it’s just too much money, you know? Who needs so much?” This was exceptionally funny coming from a woman who looks exactly like a petite, female Sammy Davis Jr. THEY LIKE IT NEAT
Once we put away the food, I followed Esmerelda into her living room where a huge wooden dresser was wedged awkwardly between the frosted-glass folding doors leading into her bedroom and the caftan-draped chairs and couch. “This is usually in the bedroom, but I have to move it out here when I shellac the floor,” she said. Sure enough, right where the doors part, the wood took on a genuinely blinding shine and nearly half a centimeter of extra height. “I had to sleep where you’re staying last night because of [gesture for bad smell].” Over the course of our 48 hours together, Esmerelda cleaned everything conceivably cleanable in every room of the apartment at least once. Windex was the weapon of choice for the restored antique furniture and phalanx of framed pictures in the living room; dishwashing soap for the kitchen (she uses that new foamy kind that turns into a vacuum cleaner in the commercial); Pine-Sol for the hall and bedrooms (“See, piña,” she indicated on the bottle); and a pleasantly aromatic mélange of Bab-O, L.O.C., Lestoil, and Orange hand cleanser for the bathroom. Also, there were no less than eight active bottles of hand lotion in the house, including one used as a doorstop. THEY’RE WAAAY INTO TV
The only activity besides sleep that rivaled Esmerelda’s fastidious scrubbing in terms of bulk occupation of time was “looking at the television.” At no point when anybody was awake and at home were all three of the apartment’s TVs off. While her son, Johnny, likes to mix things up with some Judge Mathis and Law & Order from his dorm-style bed, Esmerelda sticks with the rich Spanish pageant of afternoon talk shows on Univision and Telemundo. Their tastes sync up at 4:00 for a show that would probably have put Oprah out on the streets by now were it subtitled. It’s called Laura. If you’ve never seen Laura, don’t listen to anybody who calls it the Peruvian Jerry Springer. To the best of my knowledge, Springer did not regularly bring out child molesters, confront them with their victims and hidden-camera footage of the act, then let every person onstage beat the ever-loving shit out of them while they’re being held down by guards before having them dragged out of the studio to be arrested. NOT SO MUCH WITH THE READING
The only book I saw in the whole apartment was a guide to Portuguese under a stick of deodorant on Johnny’s dresser. It was a relic of his most recent relationship (she’s Brazilian). THEY USE WATER WEIRDLY
Monica stopped by for dinner and picked out all of Esmerelda’s junk mail. Esmerelda then took the pile to the sink and soaked it into a big mushy ball as a precaution against identity theft. Later, after we’d just had pizza, she ran the box under the faucet and rolled it into a tiny tube. Did she think someone was going to steal her pizza identity? No, it was “por las cucarachas.” SU CASA ES THE WHOLE DAMN BUILDING’S CASA
I could give myself an arrhythmia trying to remember every person who popped in to chat and sip full mugs of a one-step-short-of-espresso Mexican coffee called Café Barilla that Esmerelda makes in a little aluminum kettle-thing with a built-in filter on the stove (apparently her sisters have always derided it as “like water,” but they are clearly out of their fucking skulls). While I focused all my attention on not bouncing myself off the kitchen stool, the ensemble cast of a well-written Dominican sitcom passed before my twitchy gaze. The standout visitor from the first night was a hirsute door-to-door bedsheet salesman named Abdul who looked like the recurring male cabdriver from The Critic right down to the thatch of hair bristling out of his completely unbuttoned tennis shirt. He spent half an hour lecturing everyone present about smoking and not selling any bedsheets from the yellow garbage bag slung over his shoulder. THEY TAKE MEDICAL ADVICE WITH A HUGE GRAIN OF SALT
Aside from the cigarette clutched in her hand at any given time or the 19 from the rest of each day, Esmerelda kept it edgy by casually neglecting the tamarinds her doctor advised her to eat for her inflamed liver. Similarly, Johnny didn’t let a little diabetes get in the way of the occasional Crunch bar or several cups of orange Sunkist. THEIR TIGHT SENSE OF COMMUNITY FUELS A VIBRANT STREET LIFE
The second day, having been given the slip by Johnny after his 40-minute shower that morning, I was going down to the 176th produce market with Esmerelda when two youngish guys in parkas and baseball caps called from across the street to ask how she was doing. A couple feet away from them, Johnny used this momentary diversion by his friends to dart behind a parked car like a ferret on crank. ONCE YOU’RE IN WITH THEM, IT’S LIKE FAMILY
When we got back, Esmerelda went for a nap while I settled in with Laura (you can easily follow it without speaking Spanish). About halfway through the show, Johnny entered in a solid cloud of beersmell and made approximately ten seconds worth of over-excited small talk before borrowing a dollar and scrambling back out. RELIGION PLAYS A CENTRAL ROLE
Following her nap, Esmerelda put together some food for what she described as a “party” at her neighbor Rosa’s place, and invited me to join her. A slightly more accurate description would have been “weekly Bible study.” I took a seat in Rosa’s living room with ten older Dominican ladies, a 79-year-old Alzheimer’s patient named Isabelle, and a put-out-looking guy named Victor who kept dropping these terse deadpan remarks that made all the women crack up. The routine seemed pretty standard as far as I could tell: prayer, off-key singing from Xeroxed hymnals, more prayer, verse-by-verse reading around the room, then one final 15-minute prayer where everybody says different shit at the same time. A couple minutes into the recitations, Rosa decided it would be a good time to have me do the remaining 15 verses of the night’s assignment (whoops, did I mention I don’t speak a word of Spanish?). From the recurrence of the words fuega and perdicion, I’m relatively certain I was giving everybody the heads-up on Armageddon. While she had spent the better part of the sesh quietly chewing her gums in the corner, as soon as we finished, Isabelle went completely nuts. After two minutes of chipmunkesque babbling (which everybody, Victor included, found HILARIOUS), she launched into, no joke, the fucking “Aye aye aye aye” song. Around the tenth refrain, Esmerelda and I took our leave. AUTHENTICITY IS A VITAL TRAIT
Out on the landing, we found Johnny crashed out against the door. After being shouted awake by his mother, he stumbled into the kitchen where, wobbling like one of those clown punching bags, he began slurring to me the ramblingest story ever told. For sanity’s sake I’ve shaved it down to its highlights, which are: how his ex-girlfriend can’t put anything past him (because he’s from the street), how he was in a gang but never killed anyone, and how they used to have a crazy dog that got along well with his baby daughter (this part literally lasted 35 minutes). Per Esmerelda’s suggestion, I pretended I was about to fall asleep to get into my room, but before I could shut the door, Johnny came swaying in and fixed his eyes on the bed, which I’d made in the morning as a concession to his mother’s tidiness. Clearly disgusted, he tore off the comforter and sheets, then tossed them back in disarray. “Man, be real. Be real.” THOMAS MORTON