On Friday afternoon, I found myself standing next to the Castillo San Felipe del Morro in Old San Juan. A few minutes earlier, it had been raining, but the sun was now breaking through, silhouetting the ancient battlement on the castle wall. The beauty of this scene was not completely unexpected -- after all, I was taking in a historic site on a Caribbean island, with warm breezes that smelled of flowers, the exact thing I had been hoping to find in the weeks and months leading up to this trip -- but it was still exhilarating and maybe a little jarring, in the way beautiful things can be when we find them so far removed from our daily lives. It's a reason to travel, to find these moments and preserve them, to remember them when they seem far away, to hope to find them again in the future. I extracted my phone from my pocket and -- after the fingerprint identification failed (twice) due to the wet screen -- entered my security code. I opened the camera app and held up the phone, taking shots until I captured one in which the sun was hidden but its light could still be seen, like a fading halo.
A day before, while confronting the need to pack, I had felt distracted, anxious, and impatient. Despite having mentally prepared myself for the task for the better part of a week, I was procrastinating. Stephen, under the impression that I was already done, had just given me a five-minute warning before he summoned a car to the airport, but I continued to be mired in distraction. I had gone in to the office that morning for a meeting and had emails and other loose ends to tie up. Somehow I had touched something on the subway home, which despite repeated washings had left my hand reeking of perfume or cologne, a small bane of my existence (along with cars). I wanted to take a nap with the cats, not leave them in the hands of the cat sitters (twice/day) so that we could spend a long weekend at a San Juan resort. Was this self-inflicted torture worth what was, in my mind, at this second, looming as a few days of imperialistic, manufactured relaxation?
It was a moment, not uncommon for me, when I realized that I'm still not very good at expressing myself -- even to myself -- particularly if I sense that what I'm about to say or do might be perceived as irrational or "emotional," traits I had long ago learned to associate with effeminate, unmanly behavior. It's an association I strongly disavow now, but even after many years of refuting, it still exists within me and feels oddly dependable when I'm having doubts. Sometimes I wonder if this inability to permanently escape the past -- or this part of it -- has condemned me to chronic uncertainty, an incapacity to do anything inhabitual, let alone extraordinary, without a quavering sense of playing a role whose lines I haven't yet learned, of being a reluctant, judgmental participant in some of the best things life has to offer. I reminded myself that I wasn't going to war or to the moon, that it was good to have a reprieve from the daily grind. It was a long weekend in a beautiful part of the world, where I could expect to see new people and places. It was time to take a deep breath and step off the diving board.
I threw some summer clothes and a post-9/11 shaving kit (ziplock bag) into a backpack. I shut down my laptop and made sure I had my charging cables. I ran downstairs, pausing briefly to say goodbye to each the cats. Stephen told me that the car was two minutes away. I carried our luggage to the sidewalk, and thirty seconds later, when the car arrived, put it into the trunk. Inside, I watched the drab afternoon city roll by until we were mired in the inevitable traffic jam on the Van Wyck, where I silently scrolled through Twitter, unable for once to complain about cars because I was in one.
There were other, more objective reasons to feel anxious about a weekend in Puerto Rico. Earlier in the week, a swarm of earthquakes centered on the southern side of the island had leveled many buildings -- thousands had lost their homes -- and interrupted power; more problematic, the earthquakes showed no sign of abating. Would you want to visit New York City if you knew that Philadelphia was the epicenter of unpredictable seismic activity? We weren't sure it was such a good idea, but Stephen called the hotel and they had assured him that they were open for business; we checked the airline schedules and none of the flights into San Juan had been cancelled. Though we had trip insurance, it seemed cowardly to cancel. We hadn't taken a vacation in a few years and had never been to San Juan, which seemed like an ideal escape from New York: one direct flight and one cab ride to a city hotel where we could sit on the beach for a few days and snorkel without going on a boat. Since we were only going for four days, we didn't want to rent an AirBnB or a car. We wanted to go somewhere gay friendly, which contrary to what you might have read in the travel section of The Times is not always the case in the Caribbean. San Juan seemed like the best option. After Hurricane Maria, to say nothing of these earthquakes, Puerto Rico needed our tourist dollars.
After our flight got in on Friday morning, we found a cab at the airport. When Stephen asked about the earthquake situation, the driver told us that the power in San Juan had sputtered out a few times, but was mostly on. More maddening to him was the psychological trauma of living in an earthquake zone, the way, every few hours, the ground shifted and the buildings began to shake. You might be in bed, he said, or walking out the door, or getting into your car, when the trembling began and you wondered if these seconds were the last you would ever know. He was less concerned for himself, he added, catching my eye in the rearview mirror, than for his daughter, who was only a few years old. For all he cared, he added with a laugh, his wife could stay under a pile of rubble, but not his child. I smiled benignly; it was understandable to say things you didn't quite mean in an active earthquake zone. In response, as if possibly feeling guilty about his earlier comment, he explained that he and his wife had recently separated; he didn't really mean her any harm, he said, but the feelings were still raw. Stephen and I both nodded, possibly encouraging him to go on, or at least not discouraging him; though we were a captive audience facing the prospect of a monologue we hadn't asked to hear, something about being in a taxi at the beginning of a vacation, while sleep-deprived and a little greasy from the plane, made us more forgiving than we would have been in New York City. Meanwhile, our driver was already explaining how, a few years earlier, he had held a much better job -- an office job with a good salary -- but that he had lost it not long after the hurricane, after which he had been forced to start driving a taxi. It was not a bad job for a younger person, he said -- maybe an artist or a musician -- or an older retiree, because it offered flexibility, but it was difficult for someone like him, used to making more money, to downgrade. Children were expensive! He felt compelled to work long hours to make up the difference in pay -- or some of it -- and his absence from home, he emphasized, had resulted in the fracturing of his marriage. He was working all the time, she was working almost as much, they were constantly exhausted, they began to view each with antipathy, as if each were the sole cause of the their collective problems. Put in those terms, he concluded, the separation, in retrospect, now seemed inevitable. It wasn't really anyone's fault, but his wife had made a bad situation worse by choosing to leave him for, of all people, his brother! Could you believe it? Still, it was probably for the best, he said, because his brother had more money than he did -- and to his credit, wasn't stingy about the daughter -- and the driver had recently moved in with a new girlfriend. Families were complicated, and perhaps this new arrangement was for the best. Besides the earthquakes, his biggest concern was Uber and Lyft, which were just starting to invade San Juan. Their drivers, he heard, made even less than he did. Really, what was wrong with the modern world? Somehow, he had circled back to a subject on which Stephen and I had a lot to say.
As we commiserated, I looked out the window. We were driving on an elevated highway through a dense, urban landscape. The highway -- like the Brooklyn Queens Expressway, the Cross Bronx, and hundreds of others across the country and around the world -- appeared to be a classic example from the Robert Moses era, erected for the convenience of suburban drivers with no thought of how it would tear apart the fabric of the neighborhoods through which it passed. Many of the buildings -- most three or four stories tall -- were dilapidated and missing walls or windows; some were covered with graffiti. The driver confirmed that much of what had been damaged in the hurricane was still not repaired. The way things were going, he wasn't sure they ever would be. Maybe the earthquakes will finish what the hurricane started, he said with a morbid grin as we pulled off the highway. But as before, he seemed to reconsider his comment, which led him to conclude by offering a more earnest assessment: what's strange, he said, is that the earthquakes are so frequent that, when he considered the upheavals to which he had been subjected, they had begun to feel as if they were a part of him, somehow inextricably tied to the past and future of his own life, so that, as they happened, he wasn't sure if they were coming from inside or outside of him.
I felt a little nostalgic considering the ruins, including one right next to our hotel. I had spent many years living in and around urban squalor -- in Brooklyn, in the East Village, and in Washington Heights and Harlem -- and its slow but inexorable eradication from New York City seemed to symbolize the loss of some form of urban spirit; it wasn't quite artistic, but something rooted in entropy and a churning of physical space that makes art seem plausible or even necessary in ways that are impossible when everything has been converted into spreadsheet-ready capital or magazine-feature charm. I felt conflicted: I didn't want to romanticize poverty or the kind of institutional neglect that leads to it, nor -- at the same time -- was I opposed to many of the features commonly associated with gentrification: coffee shops, restaurants, grocery stores, and so on, the sorts of things I've often heard my neighbors in ungentrified neighborhoods lament not having easy access to, notwithstanding the fact that these enterprises tend to be the harbingers of exclusionary real estate. Maybe San Juan, I thought, was a middle ground, one that in New York City, where so many neighborhoods these days feel suffocated by money -- and its polished architectural/commercial manifestations -- was increasingly hard to find. New York was beginning to feel more and more like the internet, where the biggest brands -- Amazon and Apple and so forth, along with a substrata of corporations that are less recognizable but not so different in form and power -- are ubiquitous and immortal. Theirs is a world in which we are increasingly forced to live; it's a world without ruins and graffiti, where, because nothing ever dies, nothing can be born.
After navigating the open-air lobby of our hotel, we checked in and took the elevator to our room on the seventh floor, where we unpacked and looked out the window at our partial ocean view. We hadn't been there more than a few minutes when I felt the room begin to tilt. Why is this building moving, I thought, despite having just spent a good percentage of the previous few hours and days contemplating earthquakes and the prospect of being in one. The mostly despicable but occasionally useful internet quickly confirmed that we were feeling the tremors of another fairly sizable earthquake (5.9) in the south. Stephen and I agreed that now would probably be a good time to go back downstairs for some on-the-ground activity; he wanted to relax in one of the lounge chairs and I wanted to go for a run.
I headed west, toward Old San Juan, which was maybe two or three miles away. After leaving the grounds of the hotel and jogging past a public beach that was mostly deserted on account of the not-exactly beach friendly weather, I was pleased to find a protected bike path (and sidewalk) of a kind that I dreamed about having installed on more streets in New York City. Between the ruins and bike lanes, I was already beginning to appreciate San Juan in ways that I hadn't expected to. Of course, my mood was also improved by virtue of having made it through the gauntlet of airline travel and realizing that now, finally, after the expectation and dread, I was here, doing exactly what I had been hoping to do, which was to see new things. I was also happy to be running; I had spent much of the past year recovering from nagging injuries but was finally back to a regular schedule. Though I wasn't close to being in the kind of shape necessary to run another race, there were moments when I could finally catch my breath and envision a return to form in a way that seemed feasible and exciting, as though I weren't getting older but had a newer version of myself waiting to emerge, if only I could find or create the right conditions.
After reaching Old San Juan, I continued along the perimeter road until I reached a vast green field, at the end of which I could see the castle. I stopped to appreciate the view and the wonderful sense of feeling so small but privileged to witness this confluence of history and nature. The ground seemed to undulate; maybe, I thought, it had been formed by earthquakes.
I resumed my run, working my way across the field and down a series of roads and staircases and tunnels to a path at the base of the fortress wall. The rock formations, strangely sculptural, seemed to pulse with a kind of power I wanted to somehow absorb or harness. It occurred to me that my hope for running -- of finding a new version of myself -- was equally applicable to other parts of my life. I had been working on a draft of a new novel for the better part of year; and though I was reasonably satisfied with its progress and confident that I would be able to finish a draft, I knew that I was more ambivalent about the process than I had been with my previous books, which were written in a frenzy of desperation, as if my future had depended on getting the words on a page and, somehow, out to a larger audience. Now, armed with the incontrovertible evidence that my future didn't depend on writing novels, I unexpectedly found myself contemplating other ventures with a sense of relief and excitement that, while mired in novel-writing -- and other difficulties of life -- I had forgotten was possible. Looking at these magnificent cliffs, I didn't care that I was no longer young. I was filled with ideas of what to do next. My thoughts were frantic, illogical, oxygen-deprived -- there were hard limits to what I could expect to accomplish at this point of my life -- but the exuberance was there, and I wanted to savor it.
And while the golden light slanted through through the clouds and turned the water to hammered bronze, I felt as though I had already found something important, which I soon realized -- as I continued to think about it -- actually had nothing to do with running faster or finishing a book or writing a song or finally figuring out what to say on Twitter. The future I wanted, and which now felt within my grasp, was one in which I stopped thinking about my life in terms of benchmarks, particularly the competitive kind that I had spent so much of my past using to present a more acceptable version of myself to the world -- and to myself -- when I felt uncomfortable with the actual version, to the extent I could even say what the actual version was. Life in the modern world is inherently competitive; it felt good to realize that, in many ways, I had been making it worse, which meant that I could also make it better.
Whether by coincidence or fate, I had reached a section of the waterfront populated by feral cats. They moved into and out of the rocks and bushes like phantoms, with only one or two stopping to regard me with an expression that seemed to fall somewhere between mild curiosity, ambivalence, and disdain. Despite living only feet from a violent sea, they were not afraid. I liked how they looked at me for a second or two before turning to something else, maybe an itch that needed a lick, maybe a sound from one of their neighbors, maybe something otherworldly in the gauzy light, another spirit only they could see.
Back at the hotel, I found Stephen upstairs in our room. After spending a few minutes dozing in a hammock, he had been forced inside by one of the rain squalls. When I told him I was thinking about going for a swim at the beach -- one of my favorite things to do after a run -- he said that high winds had led to the closure of the hotel beach, but that the pool might still be open.
Down at the pool, everyone was pretending it was warmer and less windy than it really was. It seemed like a good strategy. We commandeered some chairs and and positioned them at an angle to best enjoy the sun, which in the past few minutes had reappeared, quickly warming the scene, as if we were all in a giant toaster oven. I decided to go in, and was not unhappy: the water, neither too warm or too cold, added to the pleasant numbness I felt from the run. As I slid down the wall, I remembered how, just one day earlier, I had been stuck in traffic on the Van Wyck. I thought about everything I had seen and felt on my run and wondered if I was really capable of changing, or if these thoughts were merely vacation thoughts, the kind of thing everyone felt as they ran their fingers under the falling water and let their eyes gaze over the infinity horizon of the pool.
After I dried off, Stephen and I walked to a small pier and looked at the ocean, which was rough. The forecast called for increasing winds over the next three days, which meant we probably wouldn't be snorkeling, or even sitting on the beach. We didn't mind. It felt good to be away from New York. In fact, it was something to celebrate. The Hilton Caribe was famous for having invented the piña colada during the Mad Men heyday of the hotel. If I were learning this fact on an airport billboard, I'm sure I would have rolled my eyes, but now we were here, and I was trying to be more open-minded. Stephen asked if I wanted to get one, and I definitely did.
Later that night, somewhat more inebriated, we returned to this same spot along the edge of the water. We stepped back to avoid getting sprayed by the breaking waves. The tops of the palm trees whipped, while the trunks remained stoic, unmoving in the fierce winds.
The next day, with the hotel beach still closed, we walked across a small bridge to the Condado, where the beach was open but not crowded. It was nice to feel the sand, to dip our feet in the water. We watched the surfers in front of us and enjoyed knowing that, behind us, a good percentage of our fellow beachgoers were gay like us, and, like us, not sorry about it.
It was a little intoxicating to take everything and everyone in. The sand and the rock formations reminded us that we were at a beach, while the graffiti reminded us that we were in a city.
The flowers reminded us that we were in the tropics.
Over the next few days, time passed very slowly and very quickly, as it does while traveling. We acclimated to the tremors. At the hotel, we periodically joined the other guests by the pool for a few minutes until the skies turned gray and the rain, first in drips and then in sheets, sent us fleeing for cover. Inside, we watched the palm trees shake while hats and towels tumbled across the patios. We made more excursions beyond the hotel. I ran east and then south, to the Central Park de San Juan, and I looped around the Laguna del Condado. We found a new favorite restaurant (Paulina Escanes Gourmandize: look it up), also in the Condado, where we returned three times (twice for dinner and once for brunch, after being told -- accurately -- by our server that they had the world's best pancakes, although the same could be said of the TORTA de ELOTE ESCANES and maybe ten other things on the menu). While we ate, we sat outside with our fellow diners and watched pedestrians -- again, a mix of tourists and non-tourists -- parading and in some cases sashaying up and down Ashford Avenue. One second the skies were clear and in the next everyone rushed off the streets to cower for a few minutes under the awning. These scenes possessed a kind of festive camaraderie, something that, until now, I associated with countries of the Mediterranean and the movies of Almodóvar, and did not at all associate with the United States, where we labored under a form superpower misery that has infected almost every aspect of our lives.
On our final day, we went back to Old San Juan, where we spent time walking through the narrow streets. It was again something of a revelation because I hadn't expected to find old Europe in Old San Juan. (I know: I could have figured it out in ten seconds on the internet, but even so, no matter how good the camera, there's a difference when you see something IRL.) As beautiful as it was, the neighborhood didn't feel like a museum piece or a shopping mall; there were touristy sections -- particularly near the water, where the cruise ships docked -- but most of it seemed to be free of the upscale venues that have invaded similar cities around the world. Or, even if I was wrong -- and it seemed likely that someone from San Juan would probably roll their eyes to hear me touting the 'authenticity' of Old San Juan, much the way I do when I hear tourists say the same about the West (or East) Village -- it was easy to pretend.
We found a city square where a tall statue of Christopher Columbus seemed ripe for reconsideration. I remembered how, in New York City, there was an initiative to replace statues of problematic white men from history with more diverse people from history, and how I, when this initiative was announced, had proposed (via Twitter) that the statue of Christopher Columbus at 59th Street be replaced with a statue of Donika Roem, who had just been elected to office in Virginia. It still seemed like a good idea to me.
Other artwork, such as this mural, struck me as far more beautiful and less politically problematic than the Columbus statue.
We were enthralled by the blue cobblestones -- or 'adoquines' -- which we learned were originally cast from the iron slag used as ballast in the ships that went back and forth (carrying sugar to Spain) in the sixteenth century.
I had a song from Titanic Rising (Weyes Blood) going through my head. It was only in the past year or so that I had started listening to new music -- or restarted, after a long break during which I focused on opera -- and something about this record had captured me in a way I had forgotten possible. I was spellbound by the singing and songwriting, the lush arrangements, the operatic expression of conflicting emotions, the allusions to 1970s soft-rock classics. In musical form, it encapsulated so much of everything I wanted to say about grief and hope, but hadn't realized until I heard these songs, if that makes any sense.
I had also been listening to the earlier Weyes Blood records, which was interesting for slightly different reasons. Namely, I could see (hear) traces of what was to follow in these earlier songs, but at the same time, the music created a trajectory -- from experimental drone to orchestrated pop -- I never could have predicted had I not know what was to come. If that makes any sense.
I tried to picture these streets in a larger historical context. What had they looked like fifty years ago, and what would they look like fifty years from now? Were they still alive? Were they still evolving? There were no answers other than to ask the same thing about myself: was I still alive in any but the most literal sense of the term? Was I still evolving?
Another cat we met seemed to have none (and all) of the answers to any question I could possibly ask.
As did this pair of gods, frozen in time while slowly rusting in front of a beautifully decaying wall.
Maybe it was enough to acknowledge that our lives did not comprise one circle but an uncountable number of smaller ones, constantly growing or expiring so that others could take their place. (But also: let's not ignore the fact that this statue is very well endowed.)
Back at the water, I followed a woman's gaze up to the sky and felt the ground tremble. Another aftershock, I thought, until I remembered our cab driver, at which point I reconsidered. Was this tremor coming from far away or somewhere inside of me? I wasn't sure, but to ask the question made me hope that, for a few moments, I had captured exactly what I came here to find.
