Write the Year 2019: Week 1—Tape

So. I’m going to try to write something every week this year. I don’t want to set up too many rules about what, because I can feel the failure nipping at my heels. I also don’t know that I’m going to keep it here on Tumblr, though I can’t think of a better place for it.

For this week, I just grabbed a prompt and ran with it. Mia Botha at https://writerswrite.co.za/31-writing-prompts-for-january-2019/ has provided 31 prompts for January. I took the one from January 5, because I was going to try to do this yesterday. 

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Tape

WC: 1000

Somewhere in the depths of an upstairs closet, there’s a miniature wooden crate I keep not throwing away. It holds tapes—audio cassettes, which are things of a so-distant past that autocorrect can’t decide if that’s one word or two. It doesn’t hold many at the moment. Only two that I can think of, in fact.

One has the audio of a couple of episodes of He-Man (and the Masters of the Universe, of course), because I was the kind of 11-year-old who risked maternal wrath by piling things up in front of the cabinet television in our front room to place the microphone of a tape recorder in the perfect position to catch every single household noise and the occasional distant snatch of He-Man audio.  

The other is a bootleg of Roxette’s Look Sharp that I bought at an open-air market in Arequipa, Peru.

I’d never been out of the US when I settled on the Andes for my area of specialization. I’d never been on a plane when I got on my first, bound for Lima (by way of Newark, then Miami), then on to a much smaller city on the south coast.

You’ll cry every day, someone told me. A well-meaning voice of experience, but I didn’t believe her. You’ll cry.

I didn’t cry.

I left Chicago in the middle of a punishing, terrible heat wave. I navigated the Lima airport for a 3-hour layover that turned into a 17-hour layover. And in nothing short of a miracle, I actually connected in Lima with people I’d met only once, who took me to the house I’d be staying in for the next three months.

I worked hard on two different digs. One planned, one salvage. I figured out how to get permission and materials and transport from point A to point Q when it turned out that point Q was where I needed to be and things needed to be.

I spent long days in a tiny room at the back of the house taking measurements and recording data. I watched Malicia and Time Traxx and Equiiiiiiissssss Meeeeeennnn on the 7-inch black-and-white TV in our house and laughed until I had to sit down in the street when my friend Erika saw an X-Men comic in a shop and said in disbelieving tones, “Beast no es azul! Beast es gris!”

I went out dancing. I don’t dance, but I went out dancing. I drank good beer and bad beer and terrible Peruvian wine. I drank pisco and leche de monja, even though no one would tell me how it was made until afterward.  

I slept. I have never in my life slept well. In Peru I slept soundly, regularly, consistently. For short siestas during the day if I felt like it. All the way through the night. Night after night after night, and when I look back at these few paragraphs, I don’t know how I could have and still done all the things I absolutely did.

I read, constantly and voraciously. At breakfast and over lunch and after hours when there was, quite literally, nothing on television. King of the Confessors and The Difference Engine and Dune in English, along with a dozen forgettable Dean Koontz and Dean Koontz–knock-off mysteries from a beat-up metal locker in the house’s kitchen. Relato de un náufrago and Bien años de soledad in Spanish. Also The Book of Mormon in Spanish, because I had well and truly run out of things to read.

And things to listen to. I know I had the soundtrack to The Little Mermaid when I started out, but someone made off with that pretty early on. And I had Webb Wilder’s Hybrid Vigor, taped off a CD, which I listened to over and over and over until I was suddenly in auditory Book of Mormon territory. That’s where Roxette comes in.  

Why Roxette? I truly have no idea. I can tell you everything about the tape itself. The physical thing: It’s a clear-case Memorex 90-minute tape with pink and yellow brand marks and yellow reels. It’s still in its mini-crate somewhere upstairs. It would take me a while to lay hands on it, but I can picture it perfectly and still feel the way the reels’ teeth would bite into my pinky finger when I had to manually wind up the slack that eternally got caught inside the cheap knock-off Walkman I’d brought with me into the field.

But why Roxette? Honestly, I had a moment while I let this prompt worm its way through my mind when I thought it might’ve been Love and Rockets. I had more than a moment when I could not, for the life of me, recall the title of a single Roxette song, and so I cheated. I googled and the song titles knocked the dust off of everything. They came back to me in all their cheesy glory, “The Look,” “Musta Been Love,” “Dangerous,” “Listen to Your Heat.”

I can hear them now in all their cheesy glory with disco-salsaed hits on Rrrrraaaaddddddio Iiiiiiilo bleeding right through them. But there’s still no real answer to the trenchant question “Why Roxette?” other than “I didn’t cry.”  

I was never homesick like that well-meaning person promised I would be. I was busy. I was curious and able to satisfy my curiosity most of the time. I was frustrated and often out of my depth. I was sneezy and headache-y and altitude sick sometimes. I was shy and awkward  in the wrong clothes because who knew I would suddenly be invited to a huge, elaborate, unending Peruvian wedding?

I was out of books and sick of the music that would keep me company in my little back room, so I read the Book of Mormon in Spanish. I bought a bootleg Roxette tape. And I never once cried.