Boozing, Bruising, Brawling and Bawling: Dramas on Calle Cuiscoma

It's 9am and the boys are already hard at work...

It’s three AM and our bed is shaking.

But not with amorous passion, as perhaps it should be, but with the grim, thundering bass-line of some ill-tempered and grossly distorted gangsta tirade.

The teenagers across the street – who look uncannily like extras from a Kriss-Kross music video – have their speakers trained on the neighbourhood again. Faces fixed in moody glares, they nod in affected appreciation of the grumbling flatulence they mistakenly call music.

“She wants it… yeah… she wants it…
Yeah… she wants it…
Yeah…
She wants it…”

Yeah, yeah. She wants it non-stop, evidently. She wants it all night long, hard and nasty, deep in her blistering ear. The bitch.

After five hours of high volume torture, my nerves are splintered into a million little shards. My eyes are shot with blood, scores of inflamed arteries shattering my gaze like tiny, crimson forks of lightning.

Jennifer and I resign ourselves to another sleepless night and retire to the kitchen. I pull a water-melon from the fridge, set it down on the chopping board and hack it apart with a cleaver. We sit and say nothing, eating the remains, numb and broken, swallowed up by the relentless noises of the night…

***

Located squarely between the morgue and the nut-house, our house in Granada, we have realised, is perched on the fringe of oblivion. Everyone keeps their doors open. Everyone lives in the street.

The interiors of our neighbours’ homes, thus open to public view, reveal various shades of nostalgia and simplicity. An old woman in a rocking chair guards a darkened, white-washed cavern of misty black and white photos. At her side there’s a small table adorned in yellowed lace, a handful of tarnished silver frames that haven’t shone for decades.

For the once grand colonial edifices of our road, Calle Cuiscoma, which reaches from the sordid city market towards the dark expanse of Lake Nicaragua, are thoroughly resigned to decline. The once bright walls of red, blue and green are faded.

The exterior renderings are cracked and torn, exposing plaster here and there, wooden slats, breeze-block innards, as if volleys of cannonballs have scarred the neighbourhood in some entrenched, antiquated battle.

The vast overhanging eaves – although artfully clad in tiles of red clay – now offer residence to countless bats, which emerge at night-fall and swoop maniacally in weird, degenerative orbits. Directly above our heads, tangled telegraph wires, electricity lines and random black cables hang like some deliriously spun spider-web.

Beneath our feet, the pavements lurch haphazardly, rising and falling with successive platforms and stone embankments, all uneven, sloping, cracked and pot-holed. Murky streams bubble alongside, all awash with greyish algae and curious white slime, delivering the street’s household waste to some fetid little river around the corner.

Against this crumbling and tawdry backdrop, there is a continual theatre of activity. Feral dogs at various stages of disease and emaciation sniff hopefully between the fruit peels and abandoned plastic bottles. Feral children run wild, igniting firecrackers and squealing with glee.

A tired old horse, sickly white with a protruding rib-cage, comes hauling a dusty old cart laden with rubbish. For a moment, the clopping of hooves calls the street to attention.

But soon this, and everything else it brings – the trembling metal chains, the clattering wood, the wheezing old driver and the screaming, ungreased axles – are all dissolved into the general milieu of crowing roosters, baying hounds, bantering voices, grizzling children, raunchy music and blaring, murderous telenovelas.

***

The street’s true dramas unfold after dark. All of them, arguably, are initiated by the old woman in the blue house on the corner.

She doesn’t care too much about the mess on her doorstep – the absent fathers and husbands heaped into inglorious piles. Each morning, a group of them congregates on the concrete outside her door. She happily administers her poison – a lethal brand of home-brewed fire-water – to anyone who proffers a coin.

The men will drink for several hours until dizzy, until dishevelled, until around midday, when the sun is at its zenith and cooking the horse-shit in the street quite nicely. They’ll shout and rasp, stumble wildly – sometimes swooning, sometimes learing – before foaming at the lips, twitching all over and passing into quiet oblivion.

The fire-water’s effects, evidently, are as sophisticated as the plastic bags it’s sold in. Hours later, after nightfall, the men will awaken for a second round. Some will move on, or like tonight, some will remain. The old woman will keep them good and wild as long as they need the fuel. Someone really needs to shoot her…

***

It’s Three Thirty AM and my hands are shaking. Not with joy, as perhaps they could be, but with nervous exhaustion.

The gangsta rap is still thumping a cardiac arrest, but now a clamorous tide of voices is rising and swelling above it, rolling upward and outward, higher and higher, louder and louder, some dark and riotous wave. A violent altercation seems imminent, so we open the front door for a better look.

The world outside is languid and warm – utterly wanton, grim, intoxicated. Middle-aged men lie in blissful comatose puddles, ears licked by inquisitive dogs. Old women sit slumped in rocking chairs, snoring and drooling over their flowery dresses. Among the conscious, there’s talking, jeering, cackling, banter. The yellow street lights sink downwards in weary supplication.

But across the road, a group of machos are taunting a group of local gay boys:

“Faggots! Poofs!”
.
Thus sounds the call of ‘real men’.

Soon a heated, if highly theatrical, confrontation ensues. The top gay boy, clad in skin-tight jeans and t-shirt, is strutting and waving his finger at the top macho, threatening to kick his ass. The top macho is smirking in disbelief.

Drunken words are thrown back and forth – vile, slobbering insults, put-downs, charges and gruesome discharges – until finally, it’s decided, a good fight will settle the issue.

A group of teenagers crowds round in eager anticipation, most of them cheering on the machos, just a few shy girls routing for the gay camp. The evening’s entertainment has begun. The leaders of each party ceremoniously strip off their tops, assume an old-fashioned boxing posture, and with raised fists, commence circling.

It doesn’t take much to resolve it. A few sharp punches, a swift shove, a cheer from the crowd, and the gays emerge victorious. Sozzled to the gills, the machos never stood a chance. And once their leader’s floored, he’s left alone. No need for continued humiliation here.

***

‘Peace’ returns to our street, but not for long. Soon an inebriated teenager – anonymously attired in a red baseball cap, baggy jeans, trainers and a dirty white vest – has offended a mother outside her home. She screeches maniacally, refusing to let him pass.

“Why did you come here? Answer me! Who invited you? Ass-hole! Prick! I’m telling you now Get lost! Get out of here!”

The teenager tries to push past but the woman doubles her resistance and knocks him back to the street. After a ferocious bout of pecking, he retreats down the road. But a volley of abuse follows him – a swarm of biting insults, all delivered via insistent high pitch screeches.

She just won’t shut up. She berates him over and over:

“You’re shit! You’re garbage! You’re not welcome, get it? You understand me now? Idiot! Fuckwit! Loser! Just fuck off to your family and leave us alone!”

Finally he bends down, grabs a rock from the gutter and charges towards her. Screams sound from the crowd. Suddenly, in a flash, a band of machos emerge from the shadows to grab hold of him, pin him down, take him away and teach him a lesson.

Half an hour later he emerges from the darkness and a taxi arrives to carry him home. He can barely stand now, his face is so swollen it looks more like a rear-end than a face.

***

Act Three commences just minutes later.

Another small crowd has formed outside the blue house – teenage gangstas, teenage chicas, straggly campesinos of indefinable age, unemployed wastrels and all kinds of machos endowed with various degrees of hardness. A single weighty gentleman – complete with a silver four day beard and a swollen gut fit for an emperor – is confronting the group with wild gesticulations.

Some of the high-ranking machos, topless and flexing pectorals, attempt to assuage him. No good. Now the big man is waving his fists, ranting and foaming with unbridled incoherence.

Just then, a mild campesino passes the scene with his bicycle, a long, clean, silver machete tied to the frame. In an instant the fat man swipes it. Suddenly, and finally, any pretence of civility has gone. The chicas scream and scatter. The crowd pulls back.

Armed and insane, the big man is going for it now, smashing the machete on the paving stones, releasing clash after blazing clash, raging insults and words, as if invoking some ill-fated thunder storm.

He pauses, catches his breath, raises the blade above his head. Swinging and swooping, he lurches into battle. He causes waves to part. He twirls on his ankles, swiping at anyone he can.

“Now who fucking wants some? Send that son-of-a-bitch out here to me. I’ll cut off his fucking balls!”

The crowd grows fraught, searches itself, and a young man is brought writhing from a nearby shack. Dragged from the waist by a rotund woman with long black hair, he writhes and squirms, fighting to escape his fate.

“Fucking ass-hole! Come here. I want to kill you.”

But like some artful slippery rodent, the young man breaks free and disappears into the darkened alleys beyond our street. Grasping the machete squarely, more sumo than samurai, the big man follows after him in some staggered, pompous march.

***

It’s four thirty AM and the bed has stopped shaking. My hands too. At last the great theatre of Calle Cuiscoma has drawn to a close.

The curtain has fallen, the applause has sounded. The brawlers and bawlers have retired for the evening, and except for the insomniac roosters, all is quiet. Finally, mercifully, the hideous bass-line is silenced.

As I slip into blissful unconsciousness, I’m certain that tomorrow, after the sun rises, all the neighbours will once again be friends. The itinerant saleswomen will pass, loudly touting ‘tortillas!’ Mothers will sweep down the pavement. Dogs will bake in the sunshine. And drunks will gather outside the blue house on the corner…

The darkness envelopes me, lulls me, when suddenly, without any warning, a brass band starts up. Trumpets, trombones and pompous sousaphones come blaring into our bedroom. They knock down the walls with jaunty ditties, one after another, in some bizarre, comical signature to the evening’s proceedings.

I’d get up to take a look, but my body’s too tired to move. I just lie there, wondering, vaguely, what happens next…