“You’ve lost weight, Habibi. What are you doing? You’re going to disappear, you keep going on like this. Eat something.”
Peter pushed the bowl right under my nose – curry, pepper, potato something. I wasn’t tasting anything right then anyway. We were sitting in the corner table in his tiny kitchen, by the big open window where you could hear the tranny hooker next door get impaled by the largest cock that week. If you didn’t know or care, she made sure that all of creation within a 5 block radius knew that she really, really enjoyed her work.
The room was warm. In addition to heating the stew he assured me he’d been saving for me all week, Peter used the stove to heat the small apartment that he got to inhabit in exchange for managing the building and its tenants, which were alternately falling apart at any given moment on any given day.
“Yes, Yes! Oh, yeah, mmm. Give it to me!”
I’d recently fallen apart after the thing I called love turned out to be something else, and, in a moment of inspired clarity, I decided that self imposed starvation was the homeopathic remedy to the sharp gnawing wound residing in my chest, just left of center. Lack of sleep and the absence of hundreds of essential daily calories were doing wonders for my skin, which had turned a nice shade of yellow to accompany the dark purple rings under my eyes. I guess that seeing me on that particular day convinced Peter that mine was a state that needed more immediate attention than silencing the screamed expressions of faked ecstasy echoing through the halls.
Peter stopped me by the mailbox, outside the drab office that he made comfortable with recycled plants and discarded furniture. I’d auditioned for my apartment here, after spotting the man sweeping the front steps and asking for the manager.
“Who the hell else do you think would be doing this?” he asked, holding the broom and smiling through white whiskers. He turned in his dark blue polo shirt – the only shirt I ever saw him wearing in four years of living in that building - and walked up the steps.
“Well, come on if you’re coming.”
Once inside, I sat across from him on a black leather kitchen chair with a thin metal frame. He handed me a credit application and told me I could fill it out and bring it by anytime, except during Jeopardy.
“What is more important at this moment,” he said, sliding a worn hard cover volume across the desk, “is this.”
After 5 months of sleeping on couches and floors, sneaking past building managers who threatened to evict my friends if they were found with squatters, I didn’t want to blow my one chance at getting my own little cubby hole home, sight unseen. So though I had no idea what this old man expected while he looked at me through his glasses, I had no intention of offending him with my ignorance of some unspoken rule and I remained silent.
“Read.”
“Read what?”
He opened the book and turned to one of several dog-eared pages, then smoothed the paper and pointed.
“What am I reading?”
“You don’t know Rumi? How could you not know Rumi?”
It was my reading of Rumi that got me that apartment. There was nothing remotely brilliant about it, aside from the fact that I agreed to the exercise. His first love was music, so after stocking the 3 story building with as many violinists, drummers, conductors, and guitarists as he could - all of whom had to perform in that office for their homes - Peter opened the place up to everyone else, so long as they could read Rumi.
The office where my audition was held was next door, through Peter’s bedroom. He said that I should hurry up and finish the dish he slaved to prepare for me before it got cold. And, there was a really hot Japanese violinist coming in to play for #205, and she would be here any minute.
Stacks of leather bound histories were crammed into makeshift shelves all the way to the ceiling. I ate my stew while Peter watched. Disapproval was all over his face.
“You’re so thin, Habibi, What happened?”
The lady of the afternoon and early evening was receiving another client next door.
“Ah. Aaaah, Mmmm. Yes! Yeah…oh….oh…Oh…”
Peter leaned out the window and screamed back.
“Oh, YES! YES! FUCK ME, HARDER! Oh, just like that. Just like that! YEAH!”
The lady of the afternoon and early evening fell silent.
Peter looked at me again and smiled. He reached for something on one of the shelves, and I knew what was coming. This had become our routine since I moved in two years before. I would be lured in, willingly, with soup or pastries from the Mexican bakery run by the three sisters on Sunset. He always promised that it would only be a minute, and that I would be helping him because he had so much extra. And then he’d find a copy of Rumi. I would read and his eyes would water, probably because I butchered the material so thoroughly that it was at once paralyzing and heartbreaking.
The Essential Rumi, paperback. This one was as beaten up as any of the hard cover versions. The spine was broken so that the book fell open to his favorite passages as if of its own accord.
“Peter, I don’t feel like it.”
“Please. Just this one, it’s a very short passage.”
I began. He stopped me.
“Too fast, what’s your hurry? Try it again.”
He sat back, took off his glasses and closed his eyes.
I murdered it. Cat claws on chalkboard could have done Rumi more justice than the rasp I mustered, but I got through and closed the book. Peter reached across, stuck his glasses on the tip of his nose the way my 6th grade English teacher did to indicate her bafflement at my entire generation’s stupidity.
Peter flipped a few pages, stopped at a passage that was already highlighted and underlined in more places than it wasn’t.
“Ah, here it is. Read this one. Slowly, Habibi, take your time.”
I sat in Peter’s kitchen many times that week, and a few more times that month, and then less and less as my heart mended and I tried to forget Rumi and stew and afternoons spent reading in a kitchen when I could be pursuing what I told myself were more productive endeavors.
I moved out of that building and gave away every piece of hand me down furniture that I’d managed to acquire over four years. I left the black kitchen chair with the thin metal frame that Peter gave me when he found out that I’d moved in and had nothing to sit on, and then the one he gave me to match it in case I had company.
On the way out, I stacked books I'd compiled and had no intention of reading by the mailbox, which disappeared between trips back to my apartment and no doubt ended up on the shelves in Peter’s kitchen for some future musician or painter or writer with a broken heart and a need for soup and someone else’s chronicles of woe to take their minds off their own misery.
I promised to visit Peter, to sit and read with him though I never found or made the time to scavenge my old street for the parking space that would make that possible.
We spoke on the phone one afternoon when I was rushing to work. He told me that our friend Edna, who made lemon bread and was the oldest tenant in the building who wasn’t a musician or an artist, had died. “These things happen,” he said. Before I hung up the phone he told me that he was about to go in to have a doctor inflate a balloon in one of his arteries because his heart had attacked him.
Months later, when we spoke again and I asked about his heart after ranting about some bad movie I’d suffered through, he told me that his heart was great but some some vile thing was eating his stomach and that the optimistic doctor he had just seen was very generous. Six months with maximum efforts to minimize pain. Peter said that I’d like this doctor. He was Lebanese and he knew Rumi.
When I visited Peter a few weeks later, he had lost a lot of weight, and he was shorter than the last time I saw him. We sat on his bed and he showed me a video that a friend made of him conducting his orchestra a couple of weeks before. He’d taught many of the musicians on stage for that performance, and he was proud of them. I read Rumi, and then I left so he could watch Jeopardy.
Yesterday, I found the last thing that Peter wrote to me before he went to live with his family in Arizona. At the time, he wasn’t sure where he would end up, and he was frightened.
Wo bist du?
From: (cndctuque)
Sent: Fri 11/30/07 8:04 PM
To: (me)
Habibi, had coffee with my dear friend (N.A.) who just returned from a
most successful trip to Egypt and played the Cairo Opera House to a sold out,
heavily praised and reviewed concert. On national television, also a half hour
interview with their most popular TV guy there. Print media coverage that went
crazy for his orchestra and him.
I have a few projects I'm working on. We've been approached by the
Crystal Cathedral to do a concert there in Spring. Another one at our
own city's cathedral Our Lady Queen of Angels this October.
And I have accepted a position with an A Fine Arts Academy to teach on
Saturday mornings. It would be perfect for me, as I want to retire last year.
I will not wait for that grim one. Sorry, got too much to do.
When do I get to see you? I've been kicked out of here, you know. So. I
have to be out of here no later than the end of the year.
I still don't know where I'm going.
My cell's (323…) But never during Jeopardy, 7 to 7:30 p.
Hugs, Peter
After he died, a memorial service was held for Peter Quesada by Sinfonica Del Barrio, the orchestra he founded in 1974 in Los Angeles.
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