Tuesday, November 30, 2021

the last book I ever read (Willa Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop, excerpt nine)

from Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather:

When they sat down to supper, the host introduced to the Bishop the tall, stout young man with the protruding front, who had been asleep on the floor. He said again that Trinidad Lucero was studying with him, and was supposed to be his secretary,--adding that he spent most of his time hanging about the kitchen and hindering the girls at their work.

These remarks were made in the young man’s presence, but did not embarrass him at all. His whole attention was fixed upon the mutton stew, which he began to devour with undue haste as soon as his plate was put before him. The Bishop observed late that Trinidad was treated very much like a poor relation or a servant. He was sent on errands, was told without ceremony to fetch the Padre’s boots, to bring wood for the fire, to saddle his horse. Father Latour disliked his personality so much that he could scarcely look at him. His fat face was irritatingly stupid, and had the grey, oily look of soft cheeses. The corners of his mouth were deep folds in plumpness, like the creases in a baby’s legs, and the steel rim of his spectacles, where it crossed his nose, was embedded in soft flesh. He said not one word during supper, but ate as if he were afraid of never seeing food again. When his attention left his plate for a moment, it was fixed in the same greedy way upon the girl who served the table—and who seemed to regard him with careless contempt. The student gave the impression of being always stupefied by one form of sensual disturbance or another.



Monday, November 29, 2021

the last book I ever read (Willa Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop, excerpt eight)

from Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather:

It was common talk that Padre Martínez had instigated the revolt of the Taos Indians five years ago, when Bent, the American Governor, and a dozen other white men were murdered and scalped. Seven of the Taos Indians had been tried before a military court and hanged for the murder, but no attempt had been made to call the plotting priest to account. Indeed, Padre Martínez had managed to profit considerably by the affair.

The Indians who were sentenced to death had sent for their Padre and begged him to get them out of the trouble he had got them into. Martínez had promised to save their lives if they would deed him their lands, near the pueblo. This they did, and after the conveyance was properly executed the Padre troubled himself no more about the matter, but went to pay a visit at his native town of Abíquiu. In his absence the seven Indians were hanged on the appointed day. Martínez now cultivated their fertile farms, which made him quite the richest man in the parish.



Sunday, November 28, 2021

the last book I ever read (Willa Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop, excerpt seven)

from Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather:

While they were ascending the rock, deafening thunder broke over their heads, and the rain began to fall as if it were spilled from a cloud-burst. Drawing into a deep twist of the stairway, under an overhanging ledge, they watched the water shaken in heavy curtains in the air before them. In a moment the seam in which they stood was like the channel of a brook. Looking out over the great plain spotted with mesas and glittering with rain sheets, the Bishop saw the distant mountains bright with sunlight. Again he thought that the first Creation morning might have looked like this, when the dry land was first drawn up out of the deep, and all was confusion.

The storm was over in half an hour. By the time the Bishop and his guide reached the last turn in the trail, and rose through the crack, stepping out on the flat top of the rock, the noontide sun was blazing down upon Ácoma with almost insupportable brightness. The bare stone floor of the town and its deep-worn paths were washed white and clean, and those depressions in the surface which the Ácomas call their cisterns, were full of fresh rainwater. Already the women were bringing out their clothes, to begin washing. The drinking water was carried up the stairway in earthen jars on the heads of the women, from a secret spring below; but for all other purposes the people depended on the rainfall held in these cisterns.



Saturday, November 27, 2021

the last book I ever read (Willa Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop, excerpt six)

from Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather:

They relapsed into the silence which was their usual form of intercourse. The Bishop sat drinking his coffee slowly out of the tin cup, keeping the pot near the embers. The sun had set now, the yellow rocks were turning grey, down in the pueblo the light of the cook fires made red patches of the glassless windows, and the smell of piñon smoke came softly through the still air. The whole western sky was the colour of golden ashes, with here and there a flush of red on the lip of a little cloud. High above the horizon the evening-star flickered like a lamp just list, and close beside it was another star of constant light, much smaller.



Friday, November 26, 2021

the last book I ever read (Willa Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop, excerpt five)

from Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather:

The priest’s house was white within and without, like all the Isleta houses, and was almost as bare as an Indian dwelling. The old man was poor, and too soft-hearted to press the pueblo people for pesos. An Indian girl cooked his bean and cornmeal mush for him, he required little else. The girl was not very skillful, he said, but she was clean about her cooking. When the Bishop remarked that everything in this pueblo, even the streets, seemed clean, the Padre told him that near Isleta there was a hill of some white mineral, which the Indians ground up and used as whitewash. They had done this from time immemorial, and the village had always been noted for its whiteness. A little talk with Father Jesus revealed that he was simple almost to childishness, and very superstitious. But there was a quality of golden goodness about him. His right eye was overgrown by a cataract, and he kept his head tilted as if he were trying to see around it. All his movements were to the left, as if he were reaching or walking about some obstacle in his path.



Thursday, November 25, 2021

the last book I ever read (Willa Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop, excerpt four)

from Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather:

In the golden October weather the Bishop, with his blankets and coffee-pot, attended by Jacinto, a young Indian from the Pecos pueblo, whom he employed as guide, set off to visit the Indian missions in the west. He spent a night and a day at Albuquerque, with the genial and popular Padre Gallego. After Santa Fé, Albuquerque was the most important parish in the diocese; the priest belong to an influential Mexican family, and he and the rancheros had run their church to suit themselves, making a very gay affair of it. Though Padre Gallegos was ten years older than the Bishop, he would still dance the fandango five nights running, as if he could never have enough of it. He had many friends in the American colony, with whom he played poker and went hunting, when he was not dancing with the Mexicans. His cellar was well stocked with wines from El Paso del Norte, whiskey from Taos, and grape brandy from Bernalillo. He was genuinely hospitable, and the gambler down on his luck, the soldier sobering up, were always welcome at his table. The Padre was adored by a rich Mexican widow, who was hostess at his supper parties, engaged his servants for him, made lace for the altar and napery for his table. Every Sunday her carriage, the only closed one in Albuquerque, waited in the plaza after Mass, and when the priest had put off his vestments, he came out and was driven away to the lady’s hacienda for dinner.

The Bishop and Father Vaillant had thoroughly examined the case of Father Gallegos, and meant to end this scandalous state of things well before Christmas. But on this visit Father Latour exhibited neither astonishment nor displeasure at anything, and Padre Gallegos was cordial and most ceremoniously polite. When the Bishop permitted himself to express some surprise that there was not a confirmation class awaiting him, the Padre explained smoothly that it was his custom to confirm infants at their baptism.



Wednesday, November 24, 2021

the last book I ever read (Willa Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop, excerpt three)

from Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather:

On a long caravan trip across Texas this man had had some experience of thirst, as the party with which he travelled was several times put on a meagre water ration for days together. But he had not suffered then as he did now. Since morning he had had a feeling of illness; the taste of fever in his mouth, and alarming seizures of vertigo. As these conical hills pressed closer and closer upon him, he began to wonder whether his long wayfaring from the mountains of Auvergne were possibly to end here. He reminded himself of that cry, wrung from his Saviour on the Cross, ‘J’ai soif!’ Of all our Lord’s physical sufferings, only one, ‘I thirst,’ rose to His lips. Empowered by long training, the young priest blotted himself out of his own consciousness and meditated upon the anguish of his Lord. The Passion of Jesus became for him the only reality; the need of his own body was but a part of that conception.

His mare stumbled, breaking his mood of contemplation. He was sorrier for his beasts than for himself. He, supposed to be the intelligence of the party, had got the poor animals into this interminable desert of ovens. He was afraid he had been absent-minded, had been pondering his problem instead of heeding the way. His problem was how to recover a Bishopric. He was a Vicar Apostolic, lacking a Vicarate. He was thrust out; his flock would have none of him.



Tuesday, November 23, 2021

the last book I ever read (Willa Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop, excerpt two)

from Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather:

When he opened his eyes again, his glance immediately fell upon one juniper which differed in shape from the others. It was not a thick-growing cone, but a naked, twisted trunk, perhaps ten feet high, and at the top it parted into two lateral, flat-lying branches, with a little crest of green in the centre, just above cleavage. Living vegetation could not present more faithfully the form of the Cross.

The traveller dismounted, drew from his pocket a much worn book, and baring his head, knelt at the foot of the cruciform tree.



Monday, November 22, 2021

the last book I ever read (Willa Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop, excerpt one)

from Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather:

During the latter years of the reign of Gregory XVI, de Allande had been the most influential man at the Vatican; but since the death of Gregory, two years ago, he had retired to his country estate. He believed the reforms of the new Pontiff impractical and dangerous, and had withdrawn from politics, confining his activities to work for the Society for the Propagation of the Faith – that organization which had been fostered by Gregory. In his leisure the Cardinal played tennis. As a boy, in England, he had been passionately fond of this sport. Lawn tennis had not yet come into fashion; it was a formidable game of indoor tennis the Cardinal played. Amateurs of that violent sport came from Spain and France to try their skill against him.

The missionary, Bishop Ferrand, looked much older than any of them, old and rough – except for his clear, intensely blue eyes. His diocese lay within the icy arms of the Great Lakes, and on his long, lonely horseback rides among his missions the sharp winds had bitten him well. The missionary was here for a purpose, and he pressed his point. He ate more rapidly than the others and had plenty of time to plead his cause – finished each course with such dispatch that the Frenchman remarked he would have been an ideal dinner companion for Napoleon.



Friday, November 19, 2021

the last book I ever read (Bourdain: The Definitive Oral Biography, excerpt sixteen)

from Bourdain: The Definitive Oral Biography by Laurie Woolever:

ALISON MOSSHART: I don’t know if all our detective work is going to figure out exactly what happened. I don’t know if we’re even allowed to know. Or if it’s even our business. I don’t know.



Thursday, November 18, 2021

the last book I ever read (Bourdain: The Definitive Oral Biography, excerpt fifteen)

from Bourdain: The Definitive Oral Biography by Laurie Woolever:

MICHAEL STEED: I say this jokingly but, having to direct this Hong Kong episode, then me losing the gallbladder—I often blame my gallbladder as the sort of beginning of the end of Tony’s life, weirdly.

The second that I knew that [Asia] was slated to direct, I knew it was doomed; I knew someone was doomed. I had already planned on how I was going to keep Tony’s focus off of having [guest cinematographer] Christopher Doyle take over. I knew [cinematographer] Zach [Zamboni] was not going to be cool with it. But, man, once Asia took over, I was just like, Oh boy.



Wednesday, November 17, 2021

the last book I ever read (Bourdain: The Definitive Oral Biography, excerpt fourteen)

from Bourdain: The Definitive Oral Biography by Laurie Woolever:

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: I did notice that when it came to promoting Sex and Love around the World in 2018, I noticed that he was tired, and he looked older, and that he was slightly different than I had seen him months earlier. I wonder whether he needed to step back and take some time for himself and to surround himself with the people who really loved him. I think his friends feel very sorry that he might have been sort of led astray in his personal life, toward the end. This is all speculation, but I know what I saw, and I saw a very tired man.



Tuesday, November 16, 2021

the last book I ever read (Bourdain: The Definitive Oral Biography, excerpt thirteen)

from Bourdain: The Definitive Oral Biography by Laurie Woolever:

MORGAN FALLON: It was fucking insufferable. I would try to telegraph to him, over the course of these hundreds of conversations about jiu-jitsu, like, “Brother, I have no fucking idea what you’re talking about; I have no interest in what you’re talking about; I will never know anything about what you’re talking about; this is purely an endeavor of you telling me the same stories that you’ve told to everyone else.”

He was a lifelong addict, man. If it wasn’t heroin, it was work. If it wasn’t work, it was jiu-jitsu, it was relationships, or any number of other things. The way that Tony’s power went out to the world was largely through his various addictions, and I think he very clearly understood that he was never gonna be someone who was free from those addictions.

The jiu-jitsu was good, because largely it was a positive addiction, and so, as much as it was fucking insufferable to sit there and listen to him talk about something that I knew nothing about, over and over and over again, I wasn’t worried about him. I wasn’t worried that he was gonna collapse, or have a heart attack, or die of emphysema.



Monday, November 15, 2021

the last book I ever read (Bourdain: The Definitive Oral Biography, excerpt twelve)

from Bourdain: The Definitive Oral Biography by Laurie Woolever:

DARREN ARONOFSKY: You saw this kind of weird colonialism that we were thrust in the middle of. I think Tony wanted to show that there’s many ways to show a sequence like that on a travel show, where you could edit that out, or you could really show what was going on. Because the poverty in Madagascar was hard to fathom. And there seemed to be a lot of prostitution going on, and a lot of underage prostitution.

So there were some really dark things. And you’re sitting there in your kind of incredible wealth, going, “What the hell’s going on here?”

Really hard to understand. And it was impossible for you to ignore. And then the environmental destruction that was going on was just everywhere. You’d be riding a train, and you’d see the forest being burned down in the distance, these huge plumes of smoke. When we flew on a small plane from the coast back to the capital, you could just see the country burning. So, it was pretty bleak.



Sunday, November 14, 2021

the last book I ever read (Bourdain: The Definitive Oral Biography, excerpt eleven)

from Bourdain: The Definitive Oral Biography by Laurie Woolever:

NIGELLA LAWSON: I remember saying to him—because he would have the spaghetti Bolognese [at the hotel] most nights, or an In-N-Out Burger—“Tony, the food is so bad here.” And he said, “If the food were good, it would ruin it. People would come here for the food. That’s not why you come here.”

I put my breakfast tray outside, and it would [stay there] longer and longer. And once it was up to about four trays, and I complained to him. He said, “Nigella, you’re getting the Chateau all wrong. Obviously they can’t do room service cleanup, but if you kill someone by accident, they will remove the body, no questions asked.”



Saturday, November 13, 2021

the last book I ever read (Bourdain: The Definitive Oral Biography, excerpt ten)

from Bourdain: The Definitive Oral Biography by Laurie Woolever:

JOSH FERRELL: I did the Ukraine episode of No Reservations. We went to Chernobyl. It was such a sad day, because it’s fucking Chernobyl. At the end of the day we’re like, “Well, that was terrible, let’s all burn our clothes, and everybody take the night off.” I called Tony and said, “Everybody’s doing their own thing,” and he said, “Let’s go to McDonald’s.” So me and Tony went to McDonald’s in Kiev, and had this little lonely meal, and talked about what a shitty day it had been. We both needed comfort food, and not to be alone, and to acknowledge that that was fucking heavy and terrible, over a Big Mac.



Friday, November 12, 2021

the last book I ever read (Bourdain: The Definitive Oral Biography, excerpt nine)

from Bourdain: The Definitive Oral Biography by Laurie Woolever:

DIANE SCHUTZ: One thing Tony always valued was the camaraderie with the crew, but as time went on, our budgets increased, and you wanted to respect his time, so then he gets his own van to set, and the crew advances for an hour. Well, now he’s just lost an hour in the van with the crew, and he’s just there alone, with a local driver. That’s something I wonder: In later years, was it a factor in maybe not enjoying the shoots as much? On the one hand, we’re trying to make it easier for you, you don’t have to be on set for five hours, but at the same time something is lost, not being around people whom you know and like, and who know and like you.



Wednesday, November 10, 2021

the last book I ever read (Bourdain: The Definitive Oral Biography, excerpt eight)

from Bourdain: The Definitive Oral Biography by Laurie Woolever:

ANDERSON COOPER: I think people who are drawn to a lot of the places that he went, and that I’ve gone, tend to be drawn, it comes—I think it comes from a similar place. I always felt that about Tony.

It’s hard for me to put this into words without sounding like an idiot or a jerk, but there are people who are attracted to the edges of the world. And at the edges of the world, a lot of stuff is stripped away, a lot of bullshit, a lot of falsehoods, a lot of the stuff that anybody deals with in his normal life. Things are more elemental, or feel more raw, or more alive in some ways. The desire to travel to those places, I totally understand the appeal. I also understand the pain associated with it, and that it comes from—Just as comedy often comes from a dark place, if you are entirely content, you don’t spend two hundred days a year traveling the world. There’s a certain restlessness I think that is inherent in that desire.



Tuesday, November 9, 2021

the last book I ever read (Bourdain: The Definitive Oral Biography, excerpt seven)

from Bourdain: The Definitive Oral Biography by Laurie Woolever:

NATHAN THORNBURGH: There were a lot of different rooms in that man’s brain; you always knew it was a big mansion. Once in a while we’d have dinner and drinks. It was always a good time, and I loved being with him, but I tried to not get carried away.



Monday, November 8, 2021

the last book I ever read (Bourdain: The Definitive Oral Biography, excerpt six)

from Bourdain: The Definitive Oral Biography by Laurie Woolever:

CHRISTOPHER BOURDAIN: Apart from filming a few episodes of TV with him, I took one other trip with Tony, on my own. We went out to Park City, Utah, for two or three days. That was actually a fun trip, because it was just me and Tony, and I think it was my idea. I said, “Hey, would you be willing to meet on a Thursday at LaGuardia and we just go to Park City?”

I always had a lot of fun on trips with Tony. I think it was José Andrés, at Tony’s memorial service, who said, “If you got to travel with Tony, you were then waiting, for the next three years, asking, ‘Is he gonna call me again? Am I gonna get to go travel with him?’” It was very true. I mean, I felt that way even before he was famous.

This is a very personal thing with me, and it impeded my relationship with Tony in many ways for years, but I never wanted to ask him questions in a way where I sounded like our mom. I never wanted to ask the question that was riddled with bad feeling, or, “I’m feeling slighted,” or, “I want more of your time.” I just never wanted to be that type of voice with him, bccause our mom was always grumbling about something that was making her unhappy, and I just didn’t want to be that way. Every conversations between them, there was always a loaded conversation of some kind.

I screwed myself, honestly, because probably if I had been a little more pushy, I would have seen Tony a lot more. And I wanted to, but I never wanted to be the resentful-toned person who was feeling slighted, or wanted something from him, because everybody wanted something from Tony, you know? Everybody wanted a piece of him. And I didn’t want to be one of those people who wanted a piece of him.



Sunday, November 7, 2021

the last book I ever read (Bourdain: The Definitive Oral Biography, excerpt five)

from Bourdain: The Definitive Oral Biography by Laurie Woolever:

NANCY BOURDAIN: Everybody went to El Bulli, and I wasn’t allowed to go. And I said, “Tony, can’t you just pretend I’m somebody else, and I’ll take notes?” It was like, I couldn’t be the girl just taking notes at the restaurant; I couldn’t even go.

I said to Tony, “I want to be included.” Tony would do terrible things like make me sit on the damn floor, because he didn’t want a camera guy not to have a seat. I mean, I just felt like I was the lowest of the low, and after happens for a while, you don’t want to go.

When we were teenagers, we made fun of TV. Ted Baxter was on Mary Tyler Moore, and everything was goofy. It wasn’t something you aspired to, the little screen. But that changed over the years. Once it was offered to Tony, he grabbed it, and he was pretty selfish with it.

I think he was confused a lot. Looking back now, he handled it as well, I guess, as he could. No that’s not quite true, because, he [could] be very iron door, you know? Once Tony’s closed that iron door, it’s never coming up again.



Saturday, November 6, 2021

the last book I ever read (Bourdain: The Definitive Oral Biography, excerpt four)

from Bourdain: The Definitive Oral Biography by Laurie Woolever:

JOEL ROSE: I was so adamantly against him taking that course with Gordon Lish. I thought he had nothing to teach him and could only hurt him in his writing. I thought Tony was a natural writer, a dedicated writer. He knew not where he was going—he couldn’t possibly—but he was willing to figure it out. He was already good, and I was afraid that someone as ego driven as Lish would confuse his own egocentric feelings and pollute Tony’s work.



Friday, November 5, 2021

the last book I ever read (Bourdain: The Definitive Oral Biography, excerpt three)

from Bourdain: The Definitive Oral Biography by Laurie Woolever:

ROBERT VUOLO: We had a thing at Nikki & Kelly: someone got a bunch of those bandannas that the Japanese pilots wore during World War II, before they were about to kamikaze into the side of a warship, and that was so much part of that persona we were all sucked up into. Actually, you needed something around your forehead to keep from sweating all over your food, so it just added to the dramatics. And we were all into movies together. We had a tape of the soundtrack of Apocalypse Now going on in the kitchen for months.



Thursday, November 4, 2021

the last book I ever read (Bourdain: The Definitive Oral Biography, excerpt two)

from Bourdain: The Definitive Oral Biography by Laurie Woolever:

JAMES GRAHAM: I put a lot of faith in mentors like Tony and Sam, who were really not qualified for mentorship. But [at Nikki & Kelly] Tony gave me license to run a kitchen staff of fifteen, and he couldn’t be happier, because that meant he didn’t have to cook.

He didn’t mind if I fucked things up; he was so elastic. If things went bad, he would just patch that over right away with a smile and charm.

One day, everything had gone to hell in a handbasket. Tony had disappeared to go tanning. That was a thing; his nickname at the time was Zonker, after the character from the Doonesbury cartoon strip, Zonker Harris, who was a professional tanner. He would tan, I think, largely to hide the pallor of heroin. He would play hooky, to go to the beach with Lenny, and tan aggressively. He looked like a Versace bag.



Wednesday, November 3, 2021

the last book I ever read (Bourdain: The Definitive Oral Biography, excerpt one)

from Bourdain: The Definitive Oral Biography by Laurie Woolever:

SAM GOLDMAN: Everything that Tony said about what he learned as a dishwasher was true. He was a show-up guy. He wasn’t a genius cook. Like myself, he was a proficient mechanical cook. He knew the drill. It didn’t matter if we were fucked up on acid. I remember after this one weekend at WPA, we woke up Monday morning like, “What happened the last few days?” It turns out that we had been really busy and we’d done a good job. That was being a chef in those days, with that flavor of recreational drugs: as long as you showed up and did the job, nobody fucking cared.

I remember driving around with Tony in the East Village, in this little red Rabbit I had, before we were doing heroin, trying to find it. It was what the cool kids were doing, and Johnny Thunders was doing it, and we all kind of idolized Lou Reed’s life, and you know Lou Reed has done it. It was a natural progression of drug addiction. We did a lot of junk together.



Tuesday, November 2, 2021

the last book I ever read (The Undocumented Americans by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, excerpt fourteen)

from The Undocumented Americans by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio:

Because of her poor health, Altagracia has death on her mind and is thinking about going back to Mexico. “There was a raid on a 7-Eleven near my house just last week. And the other day on the bus, a white woman went on a racist rant against me while I was just standing there. All of the racism here makes me want to go back to my country when I die. I’m not wanted here, and I do not want to live in eternity in a place where I’m not wanted.” In the meantime, she says, her plan for aging involves her two children. She tells me a story about a woman she sometimes sees when she goes out to collect recycling for cash. The woman is seventy years old and collects recycling for a living. She was widowed when she was very young and never remarried, never had children. Now, Altagracia says, the woman is all alone and left to die in a foreign country without anyone to take care of her. She says the lesson is that it is important to have children who can take care of us when we grow old.

“You can’t guarantee how your kids are going to turn out. There are good children and there are bad children, so in my opinion, people should have two kids. One of them ought to turn out well. I have two kids, and after my surgery, there was always one of them around to take care of me when the other one was busy.” An heir and a spare. I ask her if the pressure of that might be hard on the children.

“Perhaps,” she says. “But that’s the tradition.”



Monday, November 1, 2021

the last book I ever read (The Undocumented Americans by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, excerpt thirteen)

from The Undocumented Americans by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio:

So I got into a fight with Leonel’s lawyer. I was working on a newspaper story on Leonel and he had been telling me for a long time that his lawyer had been treating him—communicating with him or not, mostly not—in ways I understood to be negligent and so I called him up and asked him a list of Bob Woodwardy questions that any discerning person would have understood meant I was asking around the issue of negligence, and he asked me to meet him at the church the following night at eight o’clock on the dot, like a playground bully, and yelled at me in front of Leonel and Sofía, told them they could not trust me, because he did not trust me, and they looked down at the floor because what could they say?—their lives were in his hands. So I was quiet for their sake, and also I am not a confrontational person—I am shy and I cry easily—and I went home and I cried and cried. But after a few weeks later I sent him an expensive bottle of scotch to appease him because I needed to still have access to him, because access to him meant I could help Leonel. Our meeting forced him to go to the church for the first time in god knows how long, which is what Latinos Fighting for Justice had been trying to get him to do, and while he was there, they talked to him about a new strategy, which he agreed to pursue. One of the organizers called me that night to ask if I was okay and to say that never mind all that, the strategy had worked (oh yes, the strategy!). On Thanksgiving Day, out of nowhere, Leonel was released. He was out! He called me and I tried not to cry, because it wasn’t about me, a known pussy, and our conversation was awkward. Are you stretching your legs, Leonel? Soon after, on Facebook, I saw a picture of him stepping outside the church for the first time while Sofía cried by his side and I am lucky I was already married and will not have kids so I do not have to lie about what the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen is.