The Other Side of Paradise by Julia Cooke

Author:Julia Cooke [Cooke, Julia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781580055321
Publisher: Seal Press
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

6

TARZANS AND CIRCUS CLOWNS

ADRIÁN AND ADELA

I try to, at the hour of showing my reality, preserve its ambivalence, because that is the purpose of the artistic discourse. Other discourses—religious, political—have different goals, but the base of artistic pursuit is ambivalence and complexity.

—Cuban filmmaker Fernando Pérez

If you asked a naïve twenty-year-old Miles Davis fan what a young jazz musician’s day-to-day might resemble, he’d probably describe Adrián’s life. When he was in town, Adrián squatted at a Vedado apartment that an uncle of his, a professor at the university, had left vacant for a few years while teaching at another Caribbean university. He had moved in at age twenty-three, a year and a half ago, and taken charge of its upkeep. There were two mattresses on the apartment’s floor: a double in the bedroom and a single in the living room where his friends often crashed. The only other pieces of furniture were an upright piano, a small circular table and two stools, and an end table next to his bed with a framed photograph of himself and his girlfriend, who lived there with him. She’d helped him paint the place the color of old Pepto Bismol. The color was discounted the weekend they’d gone to the store and Adrián wanted to get the job done before leaving for Europe.

His fridge held cool water, a half-full bottle of vodka and a half-eaten bar of chocolate, pasta sauce, rice, and a thumb-sized packet of pot. When friends stopped by, mostly other musicians or art students, Adrián liked to light a shisha he’d brought from Morocco and sit for a while on the large patterned throw pillows he’d bought in Spain, laughing over what they’d all said the last time they’d smoked. Sometimes they’d turn on the twenty-inch flat-screen he’d picked up in the Dominican Republic. The walls were bare but for a moody, black-and-white photo of him that hung in one corner of the living room—the same image from his MySpace music profile, which he maintained on hotel computers every week or so.

Every day, Adrián woke up and practiced. Recent afternoons he’d been recording soundtracks for a local telenovela for 5 kooks a session, which was crappy pay but curried favor with the right people. If he wasn’t working, he went to auditions, among them for a steady gig on a cruise ship. He didn’t get it—they’d wanted someone over fifty. Gray hair, the Buena Vista Social Club type. In the early evening, a few friends, mostly musicians or art students, would stop by, and then Adrián would leave for his evening gig, meet up with people after, come home, sleep late, warm up on his piano, and on and on. The year of upward mobility for Adrián was 2009. That year alone, he’d done a concert for a rich guy’s New Year’s Eve party in the Dominican Republic, a quick run with the showcase group Hijos de Buena Vista in Russia, and a five-week tour in France and North Africa with a salsa singer’s band.

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