I, Melting Pot

Was coming back from Caballito last night on a bus (subways shut down at 11) after a very nice dinner catching up with Victoria. People here tend to speak of Caballito as if it were the boonies, the way we might mention Staten Island. It's only about 25 minutes from downtown by subway (longer by bus), but in the public mind, it's a long way away. I like it there, partly because the best used-book stalls are in the Parque Rivadavia. Yesterday I bought three videos. There's a brisk business in copied DVDs, video games, software, music, etc. For some reason copies are called trucha (trout).

On the bus home I sat in the last available seat, a single toward the back. The fellow in front of me was holding court voluminously on this and that. I couldn't follow everything, but he was talking about Jews and Catholics, so I tried to avoid interaction. He was mainly talking to one buzzed fellow who had ingested something that made him essentially boneless. He was flapping around the bus like Plastic Man, his limbs and digits waggling this way and that. Almost the moment this rubbery kid slipped off the bus, the animated one turns to me and asks me if I'm Muslim.

I'm fairly used to this. My face reads ethnic, but people have trouble deciding which one. An angry man at the Ohio State Fair once accused me of hiding my heritage when I insisted that I wasn't Palestinian.

So I told the bus guy No, not Muslim. He asks "Hindu?" Also no. "Morrocan?" I decided to give in before he got to China. "Yankee by way of Lithuania," I say. And he responds "See, I was right. I could tell you were something like that." I was going to say "man, you cast a pretty wide net" but I didn't really want to engage and, besides, I have no idea how to say that in Spanish.